Corpus-Based Analysis of the Canonical Word Order of Japanese Double Object Constructions

Abstract

Several studies have investigated the canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions. However, most of these studies use either manual analyses or measurements of human characteristics such as brain activities or reading times for each example. Thus, although these analyses are reliable for the examples they focus on, the findings cannot be generalized to other examples. In contrast, the trend of actual usage can be automatically collected from a large corpus. Thus, in this study, we assume that there is a relation between the canonical word order and the proportion of each word order in a large corpus and present a corpus-based analysis of the canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions. Our analysis is based on a very large corpus comprising more than 10 billion unique sentences and suggests that the canonical word order of such constructions varies from verb to verb. Moreover, it suggests an argument whose grammatical case is infrequently omitted with a given verb tends to be placed near the verb and that there is few relation between the canonical word order and the verb type: show-type and pass-type. The dative-accusative order is more preferred when the semantic role of dative argument is animate Possessor than when the semantic role is inanimate Goal. Furthermore, an argument that frequently co-occurs with the verb tends to be placed near the verb.