Testing the long-before-short performance preference in Japanese with a Murakami novel

Abstract

The present study aims at studying John Hawkins’ performance theory in depth through a replication of one of his early tests on performance prediction (Hawkins, 1994). The performance theory introduces three efficiency principles that predict the ordering asymmetry of VO and OV languages. A test on the Japanese language will be valuable in revealing the interaction of the principles that is responsible for the asymmetry. A corpus was constructed from the text of a Murakami novel, representing a language production exercise by the author, and at the same time a comprehension task presented to the readers. In particular, the ordering problem will be studied with a noun phrase and an adverbial in adjacency, in the [AdvP NPo V] and [NPo AdvP V] structures. They are chosen for their degree of freedom in scrambling. It was as expected that a general long-before-short ordering preference could be observed. When there was only a small gain in efficiency in choosing an order over a theoretical alternative order, the structure [AdvP NPo V] was found to be more frequent, and may be suggested to be a basic order in Japanese. The replication work revealed several details that will be worth further studies. One problem is the identification of mother node constructing constituents in a Japanese noun phrase. The present study followed Hawkins’ original decision, but arguments will be presented for a different view.