Abstract
This paper attempts to compare the differences of transitive sentences with inanimate subjects such as “The key opened the door.” between Japanese and Chinese by theory of collocation. After using correspondence analysis to evaluate example sentences gathered from corpus of Japanese and Chinese, it was found that ‘recursiveness’ and ‘affectedness’ of verbs are the common factors in transitive sentences with inanimate subjects between Japanese and Chinese (confining nouns marked by accusative case to tangible things). What kind of collocation a verb makes with a noun is deeply involved with the character of the noun. For example, the type of natural nouns (autonomy), such as “wind”, makes collocations with verbs which have strong affectedness to weak ones. By contrast, the type of plant nouns (autonomy), such as “tree”, makes collocations only with verbs which have recursiveness. Finally, the most important difference between the two languages is that some types of nouns such as the natural ones (autonomy) make a large number of collocations with verbs of productivity like “The wind makes sounds.” in Japanese, but this kind of collocations made by the same type of nouns rarely appear in Chinese.
https://ror.org/035t8zc32 
