The Influence of Givenness and Heaviness on OSV in Japanese

Several studies contend that the main motivation for scrambling is heaviness. In particular, Yamashita (2002) maintains that scrambling has nothing to do with givenness and that heaviness is the primary factor for scrambling. However, her conclusions count on only 19 examples and she does not distinguish VP-internal scrambling from VP-external scrambling. Thus, it is conceivable that some types of scrambling rely on givenness. In order to see if this hypothesis is on the right track, I conducted a corpus analysis of OSV order in Japanese, largely based on the quantitative approach. Consequently, it has been revealed that both givenness and heaviness have a high explanatory power for the usage of OSV order. Furthermore, there was no correlation between givenness and heaviness, showing their independent influence on OSV order. Therefore, I conclude that both givenness and heaviness are sufficient to trigger OSV order and the phenomenon cannot be fully accounted for except with reference to both. Furthemore, based on the mapping between information structure and syntactic structure, I propose that VP-external scrambling is discourse-driven while VP-internal scrambling is not.