Scrambled sentences in Japanese : Linguistic properties and motivations for production

Despite the theoretical attention the phenomenon of scrambling in Japanese has received, very little is known about the functional nature of it in human discourse. Based on an analysis of natural texts, this study explores the linguistic properties of scrambled sentences and investigates why they occur in discourse. An analysis of a variety of texts ranging from conversational to formal scripts revealed that scrambled constituents have two prominent properties: ‘heaviness’ (containing a subordinate or relative clause) and ‘referentiality’ to the immediately preceding context. These two properties account for almost all occurrences (95 percent) of scrambling, indicating that scrambled sentences are not a spontaneous variation of a canonical order, and that their distribution should be accounted for in a principled manner. The study further investigates whether the motivation for scrambled sentences is discourse related, such as to provide useful cues to the listener/ reader in order to optimize comprehension. The results showed that neither the principle of ‘given before new’ nor changes of topic directly and uniformly account for the occurrence of all scrambled sentences. The study concludes that comprehension-based perspectives are unable to account for the motivation of scrambled sentences and advocates investigation from production-based perspectives.

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