A corpus-based analysis of scrambling in Japanese in terms of anaphoric and cataphoric co-referencing

Abstract

In Japanese, word order changes do not affect the grammatical relations between constituents, allowing both SOV and OSV word order. Although it has been assumed that the choice of word order is determined by information structure, it is unclear how OSV is related to information structure. In order to shed light on this issue, this article investigates the usage of OSV under the framework of the Givónian approach, using a corpus-based method. First, the study demonstrates that the object is informationally older than the subject in OSV while there is a reverse relationship between the object and the subject in SOV. Second, the study reveals that the referents of the subject both in SOV and OSV tend to be carried over to the following sentences. Consequently, I conclude that OSV correlates with the ‘topic shift’ from the referent of the scrambled object to that of the subject. Therefore, OACCSV is selected when the writer intends to start a new discourse and continues writing about the referent of the subject after OACCSV appears.