The Distribution of Dependency Distance and Hierarchical Distance in Contemporary Written Japanese and Its Influencing Factors

Abstract: To explore the relationship between dependency distance (DD) and hierarchical distance (HD) in Japanese, we compared the probability distributions of DD and HD with and without sentence length fixed, and analyzed the changes in mean dependency distance (MDD) and mean hierarchical distance (MHD) as sentence length increases, along with their correlation coefficient based on the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. It was found that the valency of the predicates is the underlying factor behind the trade-off relation between MDD and MHD in Japanese. Native speakers of Japanese regulate the linear complexity and hierarchical complexity through the valency of the predicates, and the relative sizes of MDD and MHD depend on whether the threshold of valency has been reached. Apart from the cognitive load, the valency of the predicates also affects the probability distributions of DD and HD. The effect of the valency of the predicates on the distribution of HD is greater than on that of DD, which leads to differences in their probability distributions and causes the mean of MDD to be lower than that of MHD.