A Corpus-Based Analysis of Canonical Word Order of Japanese Double Object Constructions
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A Corpus-Based Analysis of Canonical Word Order of Japanese Double Object Constructions Ryohei Sasano Manabu Okumura Tokyo Institute of Technology fsasano,[email protected] Abstract In these examples, the position of the verb miseta (showed) is fixed but the positions of its nomina- The canonical word order of Japanese tive (NOM), dative (DAT), and accusative (ACC) ar- double object constructions has attracted guments are scrambled. Note that, although the considerable attention among linguists and word orders are different, they have essentially the has been a topic of many studies. How- same meaning “Ken showed a camera to Aya.” ever, most of these studies require either In the field of linguistics, each language is as- manual analyses or measurements of hu- sumed to have a basic word order that is funda- man characteristics such as brain activities mental to its sentence structure and in most cases or reading times for each example. Thus, there is a generally accepted theory on the word while these analyses are reliable for the ex- order for each structure. That is, even if there are amples they focus on, they cannot be gen- several possible word orders for essentially same eralized to other examples. On the other sentences consisting of the same elements, only hand, the trend of actual usage can be col- one of them is regarded as the canonical word lected automatically from a large corpus. order and the others are considered to be gener- Thus, in this paper, we assume that there is ated by scrambling it. However, in the case of a relationship between the canonical word Japanese double object constructions, there are order and the proportion of each word or- several claims on the canonical argument order. der in a large corpus and present a corpus- There have been a number of studies on the based analysis of canonical word order of canonical word order of Japanese double ob- Japanese double object constructions. ject constructions ranging from theoretical stud- ies (Hoji, 1985; Miyagawa and Tsujioka, 2004) 1 Introduction to empirical ones based on psychological exper- Japanese has a much freer word order than En- iments (Koizumi and Tamaoka, 2004; Nakamoto glish. For example, a Japanese double object con- et al., 2006; Shigenaga, 2014) and brain science struction has six possible word orders as follows: (Koso et al., 2004; Inubushi et al., 2009). How- ever, most of them required either manual analyses (1) a: Ken-ga Aya-ni camera-wo miseta. or measurements of human characteristics such as Ken-NOM Aya-DAT camera-ACC showed brain activities or reading times for each example. b: Ken-ga camera-wo Aya-ni miseta. Thus, while these analyses are reliable for the ex- Ken-NOM camera-ACC Aya-DAT showed ample they focus on, they cannot be easily gener- 1 c: Aya-ni Ken-ga camera-wo miseta. alized to other examples . That is, another manual Aya-DAT Ken-NOM camera-ACC showed analysis or measurement is required to consider the canonical word order of another example. d: Aya-ni camera-wo Ken-ga miseta. Aya-DAT camera-ACC Ken-NOM showed On the other hand, the trend of actual usage can be collected from a large corpus. While it is dif- e: Camera-wo Ken-ga Aya-ni miseta. camera-ACC Ken-NOM Aya-DAT showed ficult to say whether a word order is canonical or f: Camera-wo Aya-ni Ken-ga miseta. 1Note that in this work, we assume that there could be dif- camera-ACC Aya-DAT Ken-NOM showed ferent canonical word orders for different double-object sen- tences as will be explained in Section 2.2. not from one specific example, we can consider 2 Japanese double object constructions that a word order would be canonical if it is over- 2.1 Relevant Japanese grammar whelmingly dominant in a large corpus. For exam- ple, since the DAT-ACC order2 is overwhelmingly We briefly describe the relevant Japanese gram- dominant in the case that the verb is kanjiru (feel), mar. Japanese word order is basically subject- its dative argument is kotoba (word), and its ac- object-verb (SOV) order, but the word order is of- cusative argument is aijo^ (affection) as shown in ten scrambled and does not mark syntactic rela- Example (2), we can consider that the DAT-ACC tions. Instead, postpositional case particles func- order would be canonical in this case. Note that, tion as case markers. For example, nominative, the numbers in parentheses represent the propor- dative, and accusative cases are represented by tion of each word order in Examples (2) and (3); case particles ga, ni, and wo, respectively. φX denotes the omitted noun or pronoun X in this In a double object construction, the subject, paper. indirect object, and direct object are typically marked with the case particles ga (nominative), (2) DAT-ACC: Kotoba-ni aijo-wo^ kanjiru. ni (dative), and wo (accusative), respectively, as (97.5%) word-DAT affection-ACC feel shown in Example (4)-a. ACC-DAT: Aijo-wo^ kotoba-ni kanjiru. (2.5%) affection-ACC word-DAT feel (4) a: Watashi-ga kare-ni camera-wo miseta. I-NOM him-DAT camera-ACC showed (φI feel the affection in φyour words.) b: Watashi-wa kare-ni camera-wo miseta. -TOP -DAT -ACC On the contrary, since the ACC-DAT order is I him camera showed overwhelmingly dominant in the case that the verb c: φI kare-ni camera-wo miseta. is sasou (ask), its dative argument is d^eto (date), φI -NOM him-DAT camera-ACC showed and its accusative argument is josei (woman) as (I showed him a camera.) shown in Example (3), the ACC-DAT order is con- However, when an argument represents the sidered to be canonical in this case. topic of the sentence (TOP), the topic marker wa is (3) DAT-ACC: D^eto-ni josei-wo sasou. used as a postpositional particle, and case particles (0.4%) date-DAT woman-ACC ask ga and wo do not appear explicitly. For example, since watashi (I) in Example (4)-b represents the ACC-DAT: Josei-wo d^eto-ni sasou. (99.6%) woman-ACC date-DAT ask topic of the sentence, the nominative case particle ga is replaced by the topic marker wa. (φ ask a woman out on a date.) I Similarly, an argument modified by its predicate Therefore, in this paper, we assume that there does not accompany a postpositional case particle is a relationship between the canonical word order that represents the syntactic relation between the and the proportion of each word order in a large predicate and argument. For example, since cam- corpus and attempt to evaluate several claims on era in Example (5) is modified by the predicate the canonical word order of Japanese double ob- miseta (showed), the accusative case particle wo ject constructions on the basis of a large corpus. does not appear explicitly. Since we extract examples of double object con- (5) Watashi-ga kare-ni miseta camera. structions only from reliable parts of parses of a I-NOM him-DAT showed camera very large corpus, consisting of more than 10 bil- (A camera that I showed him.) lion unique sentences, we can reliably leverage a large amount of examples. To the best of our In addition, arguments are often omitted in knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze the Japanese when we can easily guess what the omit- canonical word order of Japanese double object ted argument is or we do not suppose a specific constructions on the basis of such a large corpus. object. For example, the nominative argument 2Since Japanese word order is basically subject-object- is omitted in Example (4)-c, since we can easily verb (SOV) and thus the canonical position of nominative guess the subject is the first person. argument is considered to be the first position, we simply These characteristics make it difficult to auto- call the nominative, dative, accusative order as the DAT-ACC order, and the nominative, accusative, dative order as the matically extract examples of word orders in dou- ACC-DAT order in this paper. ble object construction from a corpus. 2.2 Canonical argument order 3 Claims on the canonical word order of There are three major claims as to the canonical ar- Japanese double object constructions gument order of Japanese double object construc- In this paper, we will address the following five tions (Koizumi and Tamaoka, 2004). claims on the canonical word order of Japanese One is the traditional analysis by Hoji (1985), double object constructions. which argues that only the nominative, dative, ac- cusative (DAT-ACC) order like in Example (1)-a Claim A: The DAT-ACC order is canonical. is canonical for all cases. The second claim, made Claim B: There are two canonical word orders, by Matsuoka (2003), argues that Japanese double the DAT-ACC and the ACC-DAT order, de- object constructions have two canonical word or- pending on the verb types. ders, the DAT-ACC order and the ACC-DAT order, depending on the verb types. The third claim, by Claim C: An argument whose grammatical case Miyagawa (1997), asserts that both the DAT-ACC is infrequently omitted with a given verb order and ACC-DAT order are canonical for all tends to be placed near the verb. cases. Note that, the definition of the term canonical Claim D: The canonical word order varies de- word order varies from study to study. Some stud- pending on the semantic role and animacy of ies presume that there is only one canonical word the dative argument.