The Grammatical Expectancy of ta-form Adnominal Clauses

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the grammatical expectations by native speakers on the sentence level, focusing on ta-form adnominal clauses. The participants in this study, 64 Japanese native speakers, were asked to complete sentences following ta-form adnominal clauses which had ga-cases in both adnominal and main clauses, presented as "adnominal clause + head noun + wa / ga". The results of this investigation show: 1) the parts following the ta-form adnominal clauses show similarities regarding predicates; and 2) semantically, the predicates that denote a change of state follow stative adnominal clauses, and the predicates that denote subsequent actions follow dynamic adnominal clauses. A similar tendency was found in stative adnominal clauses using the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ).

The present result suggests that learning adnominal clauses by focusing on forms and meanings can contribute to the improvement of learnersʼ sentence comprehension and production ability.