Движение в японском языке: объектное понимание глагольных аргументов
Movement in Japanese: Objective Understanding of the Verb Arguments

Summary/Abstract: The study of Japanese agentivity leads to the debatable point of why Japanese, which mainly follows a non-transitive model, demonstrates accusative case marking for the motion, resulting in the increased overall agentivity of the utterance. Since the semantics of the motion verbs lacks an explicit direct transfer of the action to the object, the object marking of Japanese locatives in the description of motion requires closer consideration as to whether they are a prototypical transitive model. This article analyzes the status of the Japanese “movement accusative” in its formal and semantic interpretation and examines the cognitive background of the accusative representation of space in Japanese. The objective and adverbial understanding of movement is singled out and their objective features are determined. In describing the cognitive background of the representation of the motion in Japanese this article puts forward and substantiates a hypothesis that European languages usually designate a spatial landmark as an action platform thus separating the place and the actor, while Japanese encourages a human to identify himself with the assigned territory. As a result, the Japanese formal unity of locative and object formulas does not mean that they are always semantically equal: in some cases, movement can be interpreted either as focusing on a locative object or it is nothing more than a description of circumstances. Consequently, it seems possible to partially exclude locative structures from agentivity due to their discrepancy with the prototypical transitive model, even if they formally correspond to transitive structures. Therefore, some Japanese motion constructions can be considered as low-agentive or completely non-agentive.

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