Abstract
Japanese linguists have proposed a variety of Japanese deep cases from the semantic perspective. However, few people have investigated the adequacy of these cases using corpus-based analyses. This study investigates the frequency of four particles (Ga, Wo, De, No) by annotating the deep cases of these particles using the Japanese web n-gram corpus (7 gram). Results indicate that the most frequently appearing deep cases of Ga are “unaccusative-intransitive” (32% in type) and “objective” (type = 27%). “Agent” did not appear much (type = 8%), although they are considered one of the prototypical deep cases of Ga. “Object (act-on)” cases appear the most frequently in Wo (type = 80%) and they become more than 90% with “object (act-cause) cases. “Starting point” and “route” cases did not appear at all (type =0%), despite their semantic and grammatical uniqueness. The most frequently appearing deep cases of De were “others” (type = 51%) and “means and material” (type = 29%). “Place” cases appeared only 11% though they are considered a prototypical deep case. “Limitation and Modification” is the deep case that most frequently appeared in No (type = 47%), while prototypical deep case “Possessive” is not frequent (type = 3%). Although the Web influences these results, they may nonetheless provide useful insights for the study of Japanese deep cases.
https://ror.org/02hwp6a56 
