A quantitative approach to the subject markers ga and no in Spoken and Written Japanese

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26770155
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tsuda College (2015-2016); National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (2014)
• Principal Investigator: Nambu Satoshi 津田塾大学, 学芸学部, 研究員 (40649000)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 格助詞 / 文法 / 言語変異 / 言語変化 / コーパス / 社会言語学 / 心理言語学

Outline of Final Research Achievements

I conducted a corpus-based study to obtain empirical data of the subject case particles ‘ga’ and ‘no’, and analyzed them from a perspective of sociolinguistics. Regarding the linguistic change, I was able to verify the Constant Rate Hypothesis, which was originally made with English data, using data from Japanese. In addition to that, I analyzed the observed change by style, referring to the concept of “Japanese Standard” claimed by Takashi Nomura at the University of Tokyo. Furthermore, the factor ‘adjacency’, which was detected in the corpus study, was analyzed by conducting several experiments from a psycholinguistic point of view, based on a hypothesis that it is relevant to our cognitive skills to process language. This perspective brought me to a new joint project with the Section of Neuropsychology at the National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, in order to delve into linguistic aspects of the brain involving aphasiology and neurolinguistics.

Free Research Field

言語学