Paper short abstract:

This research examines the "greeting expressions" in Japanese, such as "Arigatou". this research discusses the syntactic structure of "Arigatou" sentence based on findings from written corpus and compare to other similar greeting expressions.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese is a language that indicates the relations between predicates and noun phrases with postpositional particles. However, it has been pointed out that zero-particle/particle drop (also called as ellipsis or deletion) often occurs in informal conversations in Japanese. This so-called "no particle phenomenon" has been researched in many previous studies. Many important observations have been made, and a common suggestion in the previous research is that the "no particle phenomenon" is characteristic to spoken language, but what if in the cases the expressions which have colloquial characteristics are used in written language?

Japanese gratitude expression "arigatou (grateful)" shows colloquial characteristics even when you use it in written words. As you can see (1), Japanese gratitude expression "Arigatou" has a sound alternation from "arigataku" to "arigato", which is called "euphonic change 'u'."

(1) a. arigat-aku zonji-masu

'gtateful' 'think'-POLITE

(I feel grateful.)

b. arigatou zonji-masu

'grateful' 'think'-POLITE

I feel grateful.)

When "arigatou" is used in written language, you can see "arigatou" with/without particle "wo", as shown in (2).

(2) a. henshin-φ arigatou-gozaimasu.

'reply' 'grateful'-POLITE

(Thank you for the reply.)

b. henshin-wo arigatou-gozaimasu.

'reply'-ACC 'grateful'-POLITE

(Thank you for the reply.)

The purposes of this paper are to investigate the tendency of the occurrence and non-occurrence of a particle "wo" with noun phrases proceeding to these "greeting expressions" such as "Arigatou (thank you)", and to compare the tendency with other similarly constructed expressions.

The paper claims that "NP-wo Arigatou" construction is very peculiar, compared to other expressions.