Based on the analysis of spoken narratives about a short film by Sacapultec speakers, Du Bois (1987) examines the phenomenon of ergativity and its relation to surface grammar pattern and information flow, and proposes 'Preferred Argument Structure' in grammatical and pragmatic aspects, which extends to accusative type languages. Four proposed grammatical and pragmatic constraints are as follows, where A stands for transitive subject, S intransitive subject and O transitive direct object:
'One Argument Constraint': Avoid more than one lexical argument per clause.
'Non-lexical A Constraint': Avoid Lexical A.
'One New Argument Constraint': Avoid more than one new argument per clause.
'Given A Constraint': Avoid introducing new referent in the A-role position.
In regard to Japanese, Downing's (1985) states that 'the transitive subject slot' (A) is disfavored for the introduction of new referents into text, which confirms the 'Given A Constraint'.
The present study reexamines these constraints through the analysis of Japanese spoken and written narratives that were produced by a female Japanese native speaker on the topic of "My most frightening experience". The spoken data was collected first through informal interview, and the written data collection followed. To avoid the possible effect, she was not informed about the written data collection at the time of spoken data collection.
The examination suggests that the 'Non-Lexical constraint' is observed in not only A but also S . Contradicting to 'Non-Lexical A Constraint', the avoidance of lexical form is much stronger in S than A in the written data. Moreover, while both of the spoken and written data supports 'Given A Constraint', S also shows the similar tendency and both A and S , using Prince's criteria (1981), have a strong tendency to be 'Evoked entity'. Further investigation is necessary to determine whether these results are due to differences in the genre of discourse.