Statistical Study of a Correlation between Information Structure and Word Orders of Noun Phrases in Japanese

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate how grammatical information regarding information structure effects word orders. We report results of modeling distances between NPs and predicates on which they depend by the Bayesian linear mixed model, using “BCCWJ-InfoStr,” where tags regarding information structure are annotated to NPs in the text of “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese.” As a result, estimated word orders of noun phrases in a sentence are as follows: (I) discourse-old NPs precede discourse-new NPs, (II) hearer-old NPs precede hearer-new NPs, (III) definite NPs precede indefinite NPs, and (IV) animate NPs precede inanimate NPs. These results support “Communicative Dynamism,” “From-Old-To-New Principle,” and “Nominal Hierarchy,” referred to in the field of functional linguistics.