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Article published In:
Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 1:1 (2020) ► pp.107–146

Linguistic manifestations of fictive change participants

Apparent alternations between the accusative and the dative/comitative cases in Korean and Japanese

| Hokkaido University of Education
| Georgia Institute of Technology

This paper presents a discourse-pragmatic analysis of event conceptions with an accusative-, dative-, and comitative-marked participant and thereby accounts for somewhat irregular accusative marking in Korean and Japanese. The three cases can basically be analyzed as serving to mark participants in physical or mental events that involve a factive or fictive change as a primary element. The accusative marks a change-constitutive participant (so-called affected or effected entity), while the dative and comitative mark a change-independent participant. Unlike Japanese, Korean exhibits the tendency to extend the accusative case to the marking of an entity that constitutes some fictive change in a discourse-based event conception. In contrast, Japanese is liable to recruit the accusative case in an extended use for the marking of an entity that undergoes a fictive change in the conceptions of mental/bodily experiences. These conceptual characterizations can provide a further explanation for the discrepant and idiosyncratic accusative marking in verb phrases such as ‘ride a bus,’ ‘meet a person,’ ‘come/go to a place,’ and ‘give a person a book.’

Keywords: fictive change, factive change, discourse-based event conception, case marking, change-constitutive event participant, change-independent event participant
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Fictive and factive change
  • 3.Two chief types of event conceptions with an accusative-marked participant
  • 4.Event conceptions with a dative- or comitative-marked participant
  • 5.Apparent alternations between the dative/comitative and the accusative in Korean
    • 5.1Alternate construal of event participants: Change-independent and change-constitutive
    • 5.2Notional extension of accusative marking: From factive-change to fictive-change participants
    • 5.3Discourse-based accusative marking of a fictive-change participant
  • 6.Apparent alternations between the dative/comitative and the accusative in Japanese
  • 7.Constructional commonality and lexical discrepancies
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


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Published online: 11 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.00004.izu
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