This work investigates the operation of two linguistic mechanisms, ellipsis and wa-marking, in a corpus of colloquial Jpanaese speech. Its data set is the CallHome Japanese (CHJ) corpus, a collection of transcripts and digitized speech data for 120 telephone conversations between native speakers of Japanese. To make the CHJ data useful for linguistic research, John Fry annotates the original transcripts with a comprehensive set of acoustic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic tags. John Fry demonstrates that Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis that appear to be...