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

Ryohei Sasano, Manabu Okumura

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.