Parsed Corpus as a Source for Testing Generalizations in J apanese Syntax (2019)

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss constituent ordering generalizations in Japanese. Japanese has SOV as its basic order, but a significant range of argument order variations brought about by ‘scrambling’ is permitted. Although scrambling does not induce much in the way of semantic effects, it is conceivable that marked orders are derived from the unmarked order under some pragmatic or other motivations. The difference in the effect of basic and derived order is not reflected in native speaker’s grammaticality judgments, but we suggest that the intuition about the ordering of arguments may be attested in corpus data. By using the Keyaki treebank (a proper subset of which is NINJAL Parsed Corpus of Modern Japanese (NPCMJ)), it is shown that the naturallyoccurring corpus data confirm that marked orderings of arguments are less frequent than their unmarked ordering counterparts. We suggest some possible motivations lying behind the argument order variations.

## introduction in this paper, we will discuss constituent ordering generalizations in japanese. japanese has sov as its basic order, but a significant range of word order variation is permitted. in japanese, reordering of arguments can be brought about by a syntactic operation of 'scrambling'. unmarked transitive clauses have nominative subjects followed by accusative objects. while the predicate is consistently placed in final position, the order of arguments is relatively free because they can be scrambled. simple transitive clauses can have two different arrangements of nominative and accusative arguments; namely, 'nominative-accusative' and 'accusative-nominative' order. scrambling does not induce much in the way of semantic effects, and it is sometimes claimed that scrambling can apply freely. nevertheless, native speakers generally agree that the 'nominative-accusative' order represents the basic word order of japanese transitive clauses, while 'accusative-nominative' order is derived. (note that since scrambling does not change grammatical relations or logical meanings of sentences, it is fair to say that pre-scrambling structures represent ones which are virtually identical to surface forms. 1 ) it is conceivable that the derived order is generated under some motivation, e.g. a long, complex object is positioned before a short subject to facilitate the processing of the sentence. the difference in the effect of basic and derived order is not reflected in the native speaker's grammaticality judgments, but we suggest that the intuition about the ordering of arguments may be attested in corpus data. by using two parsed corpora, viz. keyaki treebank and ninjal parsed corpus of modern japanese (npcmj), foot_0 we will argue that the more marked the ordering of arguments is, the less frequently it is attested in the naturally-occurring corpora. the discussion in this paper proceeds as follows. in section 2, we will discuss how arguments are ordered in japanese and review some proposals in the literature discussing how basic as well as derived word order is determined in japanese. following this, we will present a their comments and suggestions. the research reported in this paper was supported by the jsps kakenhi (grant numbers jp16k02628 and jp15h03210) and nin-jal institute-based project "development of and linguistic research with a parsed corpus of japanese" (pi: prashant pardeshi). @xcite the term surface form roughly corresponds to s-structure (the term countenanced in generative grammar). here, we are using the term in a pre-theoretical sense. needless to say, all of the discussions presented in the paper are concerned with the 'shallow' ordering generalizations. @xcite the npcmj corpus is a proper subset of the keyaki treebank. however, keyaki treebank and npcmj differ in terms of the amount of information added in annotation and also the format used. ## the ordering of arguments and markedness japanese is a language with sov word order but allows arguments to switch their positions rather flexibly. variation in argument order is permitted owing to a reordering operation, which is generally referred to as scrambling. @xcite in japanese, transitive clauses have the basic word order in which nominative subjects precedes accusative objects, as exemplified in (1a). the predicate has a fixed position; it invariantly appears in clausefinal position. the order of subjects and objects in transitive predicates is relatively free, since they can be scrambled. thus, in transitive clauses, we can have two different arrangements of the arguments; one is 'nominative-accusative' order, as in (1a), and the other 'accusativenominative' order, as in (1b). in canonical transitive clauses, the speakers' intuition is relatively clear, and it is generally agreed that the transitive clause in (1a) represents the basic word order, and (1a) is a non-basic one, derived by scrambling. for obvious reasons, this intuition is not reflected in grammaticality judgments; the basic and the derived sentences in (1) are both acceptable. however, we will suggest that the intuition on the basic and derived word order is reflected in the number of tokens found in naturally-occurring corpus data, in that the corpus data show that nominative subjects predominately precede accusative objects, as predicted by markedness theory (see tomic 1989). in non-canonical case-marking clauses, there arises an issue over the basic order of arguments, because a variety of casemarking patterns obtains. in japanese, there are at least three types of non-canonical transitive clauses, namely, transitive clauses with dative.subject-nominative.object, nominative.subject-dative.object, and nominative.subject-nominative.object alignments. we suggest that the same point can be made regarding the basic word order of ditransitive clauses, namely, clauses with basic word order are found more frequently than clauses with derived word order in corpus data. with ditransitive verbs, which take two internal arguments, i.e. dative and accusative objects, speakers' intuition about their basic word order is not so clear, and it is not so easy to judge which order represents the basic one, although native speakers tend to take the 'dativeaccusative' rather than 'accusative-dative' to be basic. it is suggested that this kind of uncertainty about word order variation is also reflected in the token frequency of the ditransitive examples in the corpora. ## testing word order generalizations in this section, we will review some arguments for determining the basic word order in japanese and then present a case study of how some generalizations on the ordering of arguments can be attested by using two japanese corpora: keyaki treebank and npcmj.