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Language and Text: Data, models, information and applications
Edited by Adam Pawłowski, Jan Mačutek, Sheila Embleton and George Mikros
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 356] 2021
► pp. 69–92

N-grams of grammatical functions and their significant order in the Japanese clause

| Rissho University

The present study investigates the statistically significant order of grammatical functions in Japanese clauses by employing n-gram frequency data of grammatical functions. There are broad rules for the order of grammatical functions, though Japanese is an agglutinative SOV language and complements can be elliptic. I conclude that the time and the place appear between the subject and object with statistical significance. The occasion takes a position before the subject, between the subject and object, or after the object. Therefore, the occasion shows that Japanese is a free word order language. The subject and object play the role of ‘anchors’ in the clause. By using the ‘two-sample test for equality of proportions without continuity correction data’, the study introduces a descriptive verification method of implicit speaker-hearer knowledge.

Keywords: valency, sentence structure, n-gram, frequency, grammatical functions, position in the sentence, Japanese, Synergetic Linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Aim of the study
  • 2.Descriptions of data and grammatical definitions
  • 3.Hypotheses and methodology
  • 4.Results for grammatical function types in the first position and in the second or later position
  • 5.Results for grammatical function types in the position directly preceding the predicate and preceding it by two or more units
  • 6.Results for bi-grams of grammatical function types including the subject or the object
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Software and digital dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 22 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.356.05san
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