일본어 수동문의 동작주와 주어의 생략에 대하여

Abstract

This paper examines the omission of the subject and the agent in a passive sentence. For the omission occurs in almost every passive sentence and more detailed researches are required in this field, the date was classified in sub-categories and collected mainly in a quantitative way. One of the features of the agent omission in the passive sentence is that inanimate subject is slightly more frequently omitted than animate subject (51 percent compared to 49 percent). This result is contradictory to the previous assumption that the primarily omitted subjects would be inanimate ones. The most frequent case is when the listener is regarded to know about the agent by the previous discourse. In the case of subject omitting, a particular person was overwhelmingly frequently omitted(149 cases), which is about six times more than non-specific person(25 cases). This is because the listener contextually apprehend who the particular person is. While the subject omission naturally occurs in the case of a non-specific person since there are a lot of general explanation of the situation is given, it seems that the particular person frequently omitted owing to the listener's prior knowledge. As a matter of fact, Japanese sentences can be expressed without explicitly presenting the subject in many cases. It seems that this property is also reflected in a passive sentence. This paper presents that the omission of the agent and the subject needs to be discussed not only in the field of syntax, but also in the field of discourse theory. The significance of this paper is that it shows how frequently subject omission occurs by quantitative results in each case, and that the results are classified in sub-categories which are comparatively more subdivided than in the conventional standard. The paper doesn't cover the cases where both of the agent and the subject are omitted. Those cases remain as a future challenge.