Quantitative aspects of the clause: Length, position and depth of the clause

ABSTRACT

The present study focuses on the quantitative aspects of clauses related to the empirical study on valency. We employed the length of clause, the position of clause, and the depth of clause as the linguistic entities. It can be observed that there are relationships with significant functions among these entities. A relationship between the position and the depth of clause obeys Köhler’s model while a relationship between the length and the position of the clause shows opposite functions to Köhler’s model. A relationship between the depth and the length of the clause shows a decreasing function. However, length can be affected by other entities. The method of measuring entities, e.g. a position of the clause in the sentence must be reconsidered.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As the valency dictionary of Japanese, Ishiwata and Ogino (1983), Rickmeyer (2008), Koizumi, Funaki, Honda, Nitta, and Tsukamoto (2000), and IPAL designed by Information Technology Promotion Agency are well known.

2. The Menzerath-Altmann law is not only studied with European languages but also with Chinese (Bohn, 1998) and Japanese (Benešová & Birjukov, 2015; Prün, 1994; Sanada, 2016). Prün and Bohn analyzed Chinese characters. Benešová & Birjukov analyzed texts with graphic (or optical, not semantic) segmentation.

3. A Japanese post-position ‘ga’ is a subject marker, and ‘wa’ is a topic marker. However, ‘wa’ also works as a subject marker.

4. ‘Minami’s model’ is also employed in the software of the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics to find the boundaries of some types of clauses. However, his model does not cover all types of Japanese clauses in the corpus because it focuses on the grammatical and semantic aspects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung [2014-2016].