Part of Speech of Words Occurring before Conjunctive Particles: A Corpus-Driven Study of the “Minami-Model”

Abstract

This paper surveys the ratio of the part of speech of words that occur before conjunctive particles by using the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese” (BCCWJ). The results reflect the grouping of the “Minami-model,” that is, the proportion of verbs is as high as 90% before conjunctive particles of Group B, and the proportion of verbs is around 60% before conjunctive particles of Group C.

In addition, Groups B and C show contrastive results. Not only adjectives or nouns but also stative verbs or verbs in the stative or negative form show less proportion before conjunctive particles of Group B. The number of affixes is different too: fewer before Group B, and more before Group C. From this perspective, conjunctive particles in Group C closely resemble sentence-final particles.

Moreover, the proportion of verbs is around 60% before some of the modality markers in the main clause, nearly the same as in Group C, but the proportion is as high as 90% before the modality markers derived from nouns, which shows their approximation to Group B. This is consistent with the proposal that the noun clause belongs to Group B.