主語の有情･非情性と他動詞文の表現事態

Abstract

In this paper, we collected examples of 300 animate subject transitive sentences and 300 inanimate subject transitive sentences from Japanese literary and social books, and compared their characteristics. Based on the presence or absence of result entailment of the object, the sentences were divided into type A (result entailment) and type B (result non-entailment). Type A was further classified as cause of human action (A-1), change in human physiology or psychology (A-2), and change in an inanimate object (A-3). There is a significant difference in the appearance frequency of type A due to the causal relation expression form using the relation between the subject and the predicate. In this structure, the cause was placed at the beginning of the sentence so that it could be focused on and so that the causal relationship could be expressed in a short sentence structure. We considered type A patterns such as subject types that cause changes in human physiology and the continuity of “phenomena” and “concrete” subjects, and subject types that cause human psychological changes, connections between the subject of “a fact or case,” and “one’s own feelings and thoughts.” For type B, we pointed out that the degree of typicality of transitive sentences is not proportional to the frequency of transitive sentences. Next, we considered “Yobu” and “Tsutsumu” as a representative verb that causes a change in the meaning.