A Statistical Analysis of the Nominative/Accusative Alternation in Japanese : A Preliminary Study

概要

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This paper investigates the Nominative/Accusative alternation exhibited by Japanese stative predicates, which in principle take a Nominative Object. Through a statistical analysis, we found two important facts : (I) that when an Accusative Object is moved to the sentence initial position, some types of stative predicates allow an Accusative Object, and (2) that when the sentence containing a stative predicate and an Accusative Object is embedded into a complex NP, all types of stative predicates used in this study allow an Accusative Object. The findings have four interesting mplications. First, Modern Japanese still uses the invisible morphological distinction of predicates that was overtly represented in Old Japanese. Second, in Modern Japanese, the usage of the Accusative case marker as an emphasis marker is retained, and it can save an Object marked Accusative. Third, Burzio's Generalization dose not have a universal character, and being a transitive predicate and being able to assign Accusative Case need to be separated in Japanese. Fourth. Case Theory needs to allow two types of Case assigning/marking mechanism : (1) the mechanism based on the conjugation forms of the predicate, and (2) the mechanism based on the category of the predicate. Keywords : nominative, accusative, case alternation, Japanese, stative predicates.
岐阜大学の論文
2004-03-31