DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF WORD ORDER IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH

Abstract

The study further examines how these differences influence second-language acquisition. English-speaking learners of Japanese frequently encounter difficulties with verb-final sentence structure and the use of grammatical particles, whereas Japanese learners of English often struggle with maintaining the rigid SVO order and correctly using auxiliary verbs and articles. These structural contrasts also present challenges for machine translation systems and natural language processing applications, where language-specific parsing strategies are required to analyze sentence structure accurately. The comparison demonstrates that English and Japanese employ fundamentally different principles of word order. English depends primarily on constituent order to express grammatical relations, whereas Japanese relies on grammatical particles and morphology, allowing greater syntactic flexibility. Understanding these differences contributes to comparative linguistics, improves foreign language teaching methodologies, and supports the development of more effective multilingual computational language systems.