Linguistic manifestations of fictive change participants
Apparent alternations between the accusative and the dative/comitative cases in Korean and Japanese
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.’
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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