Japanese Agentivity: Linguistic Behavior of Somatic Actants (Based on Corpus Data)

Abstract

The article analyzes the features of agentive somatic constructions in Japanese based on the material of the author’s parallel syntactically marked Russian-Japanese corpus of examples, where the cases of the inanimate subject’s influence on a person marked for the Japanese cognitive language norm are documented. These cases violate the hierarchical representations of the Japanese and their cognitive ideas about the surroundings. The work describes the uses of somatic words both in the subject and in the object positions with the interpretation of their agentive features, considering their ontological association with a person as the center of action deployment in Japanese. Such kind of the Russian agentive somatic constructions requires transformation when they are translated into Japanese; thus, the linguo-cognitive analysis of Russian-Japanese analogues explains the peculiarities of the agentive use of Japanese somatics in terms of cognitive perception of their semantic and syntactic roles. At the same time, in the object use of somatics their special subspecies are distinguished: additional actants absent in the original text, performing the functions of softening the causative force, introduced in this work as “damping” actants. As a result, the concept of “cognitive depreciation” is introduced into scientific discourse, meaning a softening of the emotional impact, which is necessary in Japanese for the transformation of a cognitively incorrect agentive statement containing a causative anthropologically oriented component with an inanimate subject as a causator. The final goal of the work is to determine the agentive status of Japanese somatics and its interpretation.