Paper

Corpus-Based Investigation of the Markedness and Frequency of Japanese Passives in Contemporary Written Japanese

---

Abstract

Japanese passives are traditionally considered to have two types: direct and indirect passives. However, more recent studies, such as Ishizuka (2012), suggest the two types can be unified under the same syntactic movement analysis. Utilizing the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ; Maekawa, 2008; Maekawa et al., 2014), this study aims to investigate how likely different types of passives appear in the naturally occurring texts, especially in relation to markedness-based hierarchy called Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan and Comrie, 1977), and to investigate if true indirect passives occur in contemporary written Japanese.

Keywords: passive, passivization, corpus, corpus linguistics, markedness, NPAH, Japanese

How to Cite:

Aoyama, T., (2023) “Corpus-Based Investigation of the Markedness and Frequency of Japanese Passives in Contemporary Written Japanese”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 361-363. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/ee1j-x783