抄録
The Modern Japanese suffix oki has two meanings. The interpretation of oki is affected mainly by four factors, among which are the unit and the amount expressed by the word to which oki is attached. This paper proposes a hypothesis on mental scanning (Scanning Hypothesis), which gives us a unified explanation of these two influencing factors. Scanning Hypothesis posits that the scanning procedure consists of four processes (i.e. element observation, reference adjustment, simple attribution and relational attribution), and that the order of these scanning-constituting processes is reversed according to whether the object is homogenious or heterogenious. When the object is homogenious, the order is as follows: element observation, reference adjustment, simple attribution, relational attribution. When the object is heterogenious, the order of performance is element observation, relational attribution, simple attribution, and referece adjustment. Furthermore, it will be shown that this hypothesis is also effective in explaining several other linguistic phenomena.
