Pragmatic and cognitive constraints on subject selection in Japanese: The speaker's point of view and the spoken and written modes

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how speakers choose subject NPs in Japanese as they plan and produce sentences. Two factors, discourse and cognitive, were investigated as plausible determinants of subject selection, namely the speaker's perspective or point of view and the speaker's degree of involvement with the subject matter being talked about (the latter of which is claimed to be a psychological difference between spoken and written modes). The results of the psycholinguistic experiment indicated that subject selection in Japanese is closely associated with the speaker's perspective, and this association is stronger in the spoken mode than in the written mode. These results are also discussed in terms of the independence of subject selection and topic selection in Japanese, and in terms of the nearly universal relative word order of subjects and objects.