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Abstract:
Unlike the topic construction, just what triggers triggers
speakers/writers to produce sentences with noncanonical
word-order ('scrambled' sentences) in Japanese has not yet been
thoroughly investigated. Based on an analysis of written texts,
the current study argues that scrambled sentences in Japanese are
motivated by the efficiency of a speaker/writer's working memory
load and discourse factors.
A total of 2,635 sentences from eighteen different articles,
ranging from extremely colloquial texts (transcriptions of
forums) to formal texts (political essays), were analyzed. Less
than 1% of the sentences in the texts contain a scrambled
constituent, which is congruent with previous corpus analyses in
Japanese (e.g., Hawkins, 1994; Hinds, 1983). The most remarkable
trend in the type of scrambled constituents observed involves
'heaviness,' i.e., modification by a long modifier or a by a
subordinate clause. Such a tendency is observed both in external
scrambling and internal scrambling. I argue that the heavy
constituent is scrambled by the speaker/writer to avoid the
production of center-embedded sentences (cf. Wasow, 1997).
Because Japanese is a strictly verb-final language in which all
arguments precede the verb, center-embedding caused by a heavy
object forces the matrix arguments appearing before the object to
be stored in working memory while the heavy argument is
completed. For example, both John-ga 'John' and Bill-ni 'to Bill'
in (1) must be stored without theta assignments while the heavy
accusative-marked object is completed.
(1) John-ga Bill-ni [totemo mezurasikute kookana Edo-zidai-no
katana] -o ageta. -nom -dat very rare expensive Edo period-gen
sword-acc gave 'John gave Bill a very rare and expensive sword
from the Edo period.'
By scrambling the heavy constituent to the sentence-initial
position, or as close as possible to it, the number of arguments
in the matrix clause to be stored decreases.
Another characteristic of scrambled sentences is that the
scrambled constituents tend to refer to the immediately preceding
context. Such a tendency can result from production and discourse
factors. A phrase referring to what has just been evoked is more
'accessible' in production (e.g., Bock and Warren, 1985) but it
also augments the smooth flow of the discourse.
The fact that almost all (95%) scrambled constituents share
the characteristics of heaviness and/or a reference to the
immediately preceding context indicates that occurrences of
scrambled sentences are strictly regulated by syntactic
characteristics, efficiency in production, and the priority of
information in the discourse.
Bock and Warren (1985). Conceptual accessibility and syntactic
structure in sentence formulation.
Cognition,
21, 47--67.
Hawkins, J. (1994).
A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Hinds, J. (1983). Topic continuity in Japanese.Article title. In
Givon, T. (ed.),
Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Language
Study.
John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 47--93.
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