抄録
The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that people's preference of the word order of Japanese sentences correlates with meanings that cannot be reduced to meanings of head verbs. For this purpose, we conducted two experiments to compare two groups of sentences with different “supra-lexical” meanings (of “caused motion” and “caused possession”), with respect to the different configurations of case-marking particles, or case-markers, -ga, -ni, and -wo. In the experiments, participants were presented phrases (NPs and a verb) which made a sentence in a random order. After a short delay, the participants were required to recall and speak out the learned phrases in a natural sentence format. In Experiment 1, 20 caused possession and 20 caused movement sentences were prepared for the experimental materials. All the sentence including nominals marked by -ga, -ni, and -wo. The nouns and verbs in the total of 40 sentences were all different. In Experiment 2, 16 pairs of sentences which had a same verb but had different constructional meanings were prepared for the caused motion and possession sentences. The results of the two experiments showed that the participants recalled the phrases in the order of “N-ga N-wo N-ni V” for the caused motion sentences more often than for the caused possession sentences in both of two experiments. These results suggest that, while there is an overall tendency for Japanese speakers to prefer “N-ga N-ni N-wo V” order to “N-ga N-wo N-ni V” order, the strength of the preference is not constant among different supra-lexical meanings.
