A Corpus-Based Analysis of Canonical Word Order of Japanese Double Object Constructions

Abstract

The canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions has attracted considerable attention among linguists and has been a topic of many studies. However, most of these studies require either manual analyses or measurements of human characteristics such as brain activities or reading times for each example. Thus, while these analyses are reliable for the examples they focus on, they cannot be generalized to other examples. On the other hand, the trend of actual usage can be collected automatically from a large corpus. Thus, in this paper, we assume that there is a relationship between the canonical word order and the proportion of each word order in a large corpus and present a corpusbased analysis of canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions.

Language Models as an Alternative Evaluator of Word Order Hypotheses: A Case Study in Japanese

“…The motivations for revealing the canonical word order range from linguistic interests to those involved in various other fields-it relates to language acquisition and production in psycholinguistics (Slobin and Bever, 1982;Akhtar, 1999), second language education (Alonso Belmonte et al, 2000), and natural language generation (Visweswariah et al, 2011) or error cor-rection (Cheng et al, 2014) in NLP. In Japanese, there are also many studies on its canonical word order (Hoji, 1985;Saeki, 1998;Koizumi and Tamaoka, 2004;Sasano and Okumura, 2016).…”

“…In this study, we specifically focus on the Japanese language due to its complex and flexible word order. There are many claims on the canonical word order of Japanese, and it has attracted considerable attention from linguists and natural language processing (NLP) researchers for decades (Hoji, 1985;Saeki, 1998;Miyamoto, 2002;Matsuoka, 2003;Koizumi and Tamaoka, 2004;Nakamoto et al, 2006;Shigenaga, 2014;Sasano and Okumura, 2016;Orita, 2017;Asahara et al, 2018).…”

Predicting Japanese Word Order in Double Object Constructions

“…Table 1 shows a comparison with the latest corpus studies on Japanese word ordering. Sasano and Okumura (2016) explored the canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions (either SUBJ-IOBJ-DOBJ-PRED or SUBJ-DOBJ-IOBJ-PRED) by a large-scale web corpus. The web corpus contains 10 billion sentences parsed by the Japanese morphological analyzer JUMAN and the syntactic analyzer KNP.…”

Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

“…Incorporating the information status of an NP with another factor 'long-before-short' proposed in the previous studies, we built a statistical model (Sasano and Okumura, 2016) (Orita, 2017) The to predict the word orders in the DOC. One important advantage of our study is that, with the latest version of the corpus we used (See Section 3), the information status of an NP can be analyzed not simply by bipartite groups as either pronoun (given) or others (new) but by the number of coindexed items in a preceding text.…”

“…2 Preceding Work Table 1 shows a comparison with the latest corpus studies on Japanese word ordering. Sasano and Okumura (2016) explored the canonical word order of Japanese double object constructions (either SUBJ-IOBJ-DOBJ-PRED or SUBJ-DOBJ-IOBJ-PRED) by a large-scale web corpus. The web corpus contains 10 billion sentences parsed by the Japanese morphological analyzer JUMAN and the syntactic analyzer KNP.…”