Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SAdvOV (S is subject phrase, Adv adverb, O object phrase and V verb), AdvSOV, SAdvOV and SOAdvV word orders. SAdvOV word order was found to be the most quickly processed, for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 1) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 2). Thus, the canonical position for these adverbial phrases is identified as the position immediately preceding the object (Theme argument). This finding was replicated when the same experimental methods were applied to event-denoting noun phrases. Adverbial adjuncts in the initial position (AdvON, N is noun phrase) were processed more quickly and accurately than noun phrases with adverbial phrases in the second position (OAdvN), for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 3) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 4). Therefore, the position immediately preceding the object is the canonical position for both instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in sentences and in noun phrases. In conclusion, this indicates that the base structure of a sentence is shared by its related noun phrase.