Sammendrag
Partikler i Japansk språk viser gramatiske og semantiske forhold mellom substantiver, men i muntlig tale mangler ofte partiklene. Noen forskere påstår at dette fenomenet er bare “particle drop”, mens andre hevder at det finnes også en annen funksjon. I noen tilfeller kan man ikke sette noen partikkel i den tomme plassen. Dette kalles “Zero Particle” i denne oppgaven. Eksisterende forskning på dette feltet har vært basert på et pragmatisk synspunkt. Det har vært gjort mindre forskning med et syntaktisk synspunkt, som denne oppgaven har.
I denne oppgaven gjøres det to forskjellige undersøkelser. I den første svarer 17 personer med japansk som morsmål på spørsmål for å finne ut de syntaktiske villkårene for når “particle drop” skjer. I den andre undersøkelsen velges det ut setninger uten partikkel fra CALLHOME Japanese transcripts korpuset, som sorteres og analyseres for å finne villkårene for “Zero Particle”.
Fra undersøkelsen ble det funnet tre forskjellige typer setninger uten partikkel. Den første er “particle drop”, den andre er “Zero Particle” som eksisterende forskning har fokusert på, men den tredje representerer en ny type der man ikke kan sette inn noen partikler.
Japanese is an agglutinative language, with particles that are function words showing the cases or grammatical and semantical relationships of the nouns. However, in colloquial speech it is quite usual that there is absence of these particles. Some researchers claim that absence of particles is simply particle drop, while others claim that there is not only particle drop but also another function. In some cases no particle can be placed the vacant place, which in this thesis is called Zero Particle. Previous research on the absence of particle has primarily focused on a pragmatic point of view, so this is an area which has seen little syntactical research, which is the purpose of this thesis.
In order to examine whether the absence of particle represents particle drop or zero particle a survey was created and given to 17 native Japanese speakers and analyzed, resulting in the identification of two conditions for particle drop: Animacy and word order.
To find examples of zero particles occurring in natural conversations, we also examined the CALLHOME Japanese Transcripts. In total, 464 sentences were selected and analyzed in detail. We identified 30 occurrences of zero particle, of which two are of a new type. A characteristic of these two occurrences is that a native Japanese speaker would not place any particle where there is absence of particle. Interestingly, the absence of particle follows the pronoun “watashi” (I).
In conclusion, in this thesis we find that there are three types of absence of particle: particle drop, and two types of Zero Particle.