Abstract
The current research analyzes the effect of length and referential phrases on scrambled word-orders in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) [National Institute for Japanese Language & National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (2004)]. Three types of sentence structures are examined: sentences with a transitive verb, a ditransitive verb and a transitive verb that takes ni-marked locatives. Within sentences in which all relevant arguments are overtly present (totaling 1,107 sentences), the ratios of scrambled order in transitive sentences, ditransitive sentences and transitive sentences with a locative ni-phrase are 6.5, 31.7 and 49.1%, respectively. This shows a great deal of variety in the frequency of scrambled sentences among sentence types. The results also confirm the effects of length and referential phrase in the production of scrambled sentences. Namely, long arguments or arguments containing a referential phrase are placed ahead in the sentences. In addition to the length effect, the study finds that the most common case of scrambling is when the canonically-preceding phrase is only one Bunsetsu (the smallest semantic unit, content words followed by a case marker or a postposition when applicable) in length. The results show that Japanese speakers tend to produce a syntactic structure that positions words of semantic or discourse prominency ahead of others, as with speakers of head-initial languages. On the other hand, they position long phrases ahead of short phrases rather than postponing like speakers of head-initial languages. This difference between the two types of language is discussed in terms of the head-directions and the flexibility of word-order.
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- 1.
The notion of “canonical order” may be defined in several ways. It may be defined as the most widely assumed order, the most frequently observed order in natural use, or as an order at the pre-syntactic derivation stage (‘base’ order; Miyagawa & Tsujioka, 2004). In the current study, canonical order is defined as the first. See the discussion of the frequency of word-order and the strength of keeping the canonical order (canonicality) in the later sections.
- 2.
The analysis excluded cases in which sentences contained both a subject and a topic in one sentence.
- 3.
In TR with a TOP phrase and in DTR or TRL with a topic or subject, the number of scrambled sentences was too small to investigate the effects of phrase length and referential phrases. Therefore, these cases were excluded in the subsequent analysis.
- 4.
A very small number of sentences contained referential phrases in both relevant arguments: only five sentences in the transitive, two sentences in the ditransitive and 10 in the transitive with locative, as shown in the “Both” column in Table 4. Those 17 sentences were excluded in the following analyses.
- 5.
Another possibility is suggested by a computational model of English and Japanese sentence production. The model proposed in Chang (2009) learns the syntactic representations for each language from message-sentence pairs and it can exhibit heavy NP shift in the appropriate direction for each language. In English, it depends more on statistical structural regularities in the post-verbal positions (light phrases are more frequent than heavy phrases in these positions). Japanese has few structural cues at the position where sentence structures are chosen and therefore the model depends more on meaning in these positions and heavy elements have an enriched meaning representation that biases them to go earlier.
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Acknowledgement
Part of this chapter was presented at the joint workshop of the Mental Architecture for Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL) and the Thought and Language (TL) Workshop by the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE) in August 2008. We thank the reviewers of this book, the participants of those workshops, Yuki Hirose, Florian Jaeger and Franklin Chang for their comments.
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Kondo, T., Yamashita, H. (2010). Why Speakers Produce Scrambled Sentences: An Analysis of a Spoken Language Corpus in Japanese. In: Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y., Packard, J. (eds) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_10
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