Predicting Japanese scrambling in the wild

Naho Orita


Abstract
Japanese speakers have a choice between canonical SOV and scrambled OSV word order to express the same meaning. Although previous experiments examine the influence of one or two factors for scrambling in a controlled setting, it is not yet known what kinds of multiple effects contribute to scrambling. This study uses naturally distributed data to test the multiple effects on scrambling simultaneously. A regression analysis replicates the NP length effect and suggests the influence of noun types, but it provides no evidence for syntactic priming, given-new ordering, and the animacy effect. These findings only show evidence for sentence-internal factors, but we find no evidence that discourse level factors play a role.
Anthology ID:
W17-0706
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2017)
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Ted Gibson, Tal Linzen, Asad Sayeed, Martin van Schijndel, William Schuler
Venue:
CMCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
41–45
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-0706
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-0706
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naho Orita. 2017. Predicting Japanese scrambling in the wild. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2017), pages 41–45, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Japanese scrambling in the wild (Orita, CMCL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-0706.pdf