Literary Japanese seems to be a typical dependent-marking language because it does not have personal verb endings, and the grammatical relation between the verb and the core arguments is expressed by case particles. However, when we observe colloquial Japanese, we notice that most sentences have no core arguments, and arguments that do appear have no overt marking to indicate their subject and object functions. On the other hand, some inverse markers such as the yari-morai verbs (the grammaticalized auxiliary verbs 'give' and 'receive') and the passive and some modal forms of the verbs and emotional verbs have person restrictions. Therefore, it can be said that colloquial Japanese has the characteristics of a head-marking language. In this paper, I first examine previous research concerning the hypothesis above and discuss the following topics: (1) the opposition between the arguments with wa / ga / o and the arguments with no overt marking and selection condition, (2) how many and what kind of head-marking elements exist in colloquial Japanese. Second, I examine all the utterances in a movie scene by hand to characterize actual usage in colloquial Japanese. As a result, we can observe 312 (27.8% of all the sentences) tokens of arguments with overt subject marking and 118 tokens without marking. Most of the arguments with wa have the function of contrast (Taihi), while most of the arguments with ga have the function of prominence (Souki). Therefore, it can be said that no-marking (or absolute case) is the default case marker of colloquial Japanese. On the other hand, there are 243 tokens (21.6% of all the sentences) of predicates that indicate the person of the sentence indirectly. In conclusion, colloquial Japanese cannot be regarded as a dependent-marking language. Although it is difficult to regard colloquial Japanese as an exact head-marking language, I have shown that it has various indirect head markers, such as inverse markers, and demonstrated their use.
日本語(話しことば)は従属部標示型の言語なのか? : 映画のシナリオの分析による検証
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概要
