動詞「見せる」に関する一考察 -「見せる」動作の対象を中心に-

Abstract

The verb “miseru” means “showing”, and it can be used in the following sentencestructure: "AがBにCを見せる." Here, A represents an Agent, B represents a Patient,and C represents an Object. Unlike an agent and a patient, who are always humans,various things can serve as an object, such as a human (e.g., hanayome wo miseru(花嫁を見せる), a thing (e.g., denbunn wo miseru (電文を見せる)), or an event (e.g.,ittchi wo miseru (一致を見せる)). However, not all nouns (or noun phrases) can serve as an object of the verb“miseru,” as shown by the following examples that are inappropriate: “jiyuu wo miseru(自由を見せる)”, “mendo wo miseru (面倒を見せる)”. In this paper, we examined empirical data to address the question: what servethe object of the verb “miseru” as in the sentence structure “AがBにCを見せる”?The results showed that the things that have concrete forms, such as a thing, partsof the body (mono (モノ)), were most often used as objects. In addition, things thathave less concrete forms, such as human figure, appearance, reaction, facialexpression, and motion (koto (コト)) also found to serve as objects. Furthermore,ideas that do not have concrete forms nor can be visualized, such as inner feelings,status, will, physical condition, abstract concepts also served as objects. All thesedifferent kinds of objects had one common characteristic; they all belonged to theagent. Finally, the verb “miseru” can be also used when the patient notices the object,as opposed to when the agent shows an object. In such a case, non-volitional objectsof the verb “miseru”, such as “suki(隙)”,“kehai(気配)”,“iro(色)”were used.