An empirical study on the nominative/accusative objects in terms of their domains, information structures, and intonations

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26580081
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Chukyo University
• Principal Investigator: Nomura Masashi 中京大学, 国際教養学部, 准教授 (60410619)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 主格・対格目的語 / 統語論 / 音声知覚実験 / 容認度判断実験 / コーパス / 情報構造

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research project focuses on the nominative/accusative objects in terms of their syntactic, information structural, and prosodic behaviors, making use of empirical data from experiments in Japanese and Korean. We have conducted experiments with acceptability judgment and perceptual tasks in order to analyze the phenomenon from a various point of views. The findings tell us that the use of the nominative/accusative objects is affected by information structure of a sentence. In addition, the data provides new evidence to support the hypothesis that the particle ‘ga’ functions as information structural focus, and ‘wa’ covers old information other than topic.

Free Research Field

統語論