A Statistical Analysis of the Nominative/Genitive Alternation in Japanese : A Preliminary Study

This paper investigates the Nominative/Genitive alternation based on a statistical survey, and provides some interesting findings. First, a very large number of native speakers of Japanese do not allow Genitive Subject in a complex NP. Second, two varieties of Japanese are observed with respect to the Nominative/Genitive alternation : (1) a variety that does not allow Genitive Subject in the configuration in which the Nominative/Genitive alternation has been considered to be potentially possible, and (2) a variety that allows Genitive Subject in the same configuration, but keeps the transitivity restriction. Third, variety (2) does not allow the Nominative/Genitive alternation when the verb is a pseudo-transitive that has Object marked Dative. Fourth, variety (2) does not allow the Nominative/Genitive alternation in a comparative clause. Fifth, for speakers of variety (2), adjacency between the verb and Genitive Subject has no effect on the Nominative/Genitive alternation. Keywords : nominative, genitive, case alternation, Japanese, transitivit