Japanese speakers have a choice between canonical SOV and scrambled OSV word order to express the same meaning. Although previous experiments examine the influence of one or two factors for scrambling in a controlled setting, it is not yet known what kinds of multiple effects contribute to scrambling. This study uses naturally distributed data to test the multiple effects on scrambling simultaneously. A regression analysis replicates the NP length effect and suggests the influence of noun types, but it provides no evidence for syntactic priming, given-new ordering, and the animacy effect. These findings only show evidence for sentence-internal factors, but we find no evidence that discourse level factors play a role.

This study proposes a computational model of the discourse segments in lyrics to understand and to model the structure of lyrics. To test our hypothesis that discourse segmentations in lyrics strongly correlate with repeated patterns, we conduct the first large-scale corpus study on discourse segments in lyrics. Next, we propose the task to automatically identify segment boundaries in lyrics and train a logistic regression model for the task with the repeated pattern and textual features. The results of our empirical experiments illustrate the significance of capturing repeated patterns in predicting the boundaries of discourse segments in lyrics.