Peripheral Actants in the Japanese Sentence: Case Alternation and Change of Agentive Status (Experience in Corpus Study)

Abstract

The article examines the peripheral actants in Japanese utterance on the degree of expression of their prototypical agentive characteristics: volition, affectedness, ability to control, individuality, etc. The research was based on the material of author’s parallel Russian-Japanese fiction corpus. While analyzing cases of permutative voice in Japanese it is revealed that cases of anthropo-oriented impact of an inanimate subject are characterized by a focus shift from a human as a causation object and bringing him to the syntactic periphery with the raising of a means/instruments or somatics to an object position. A specific type of syntactic transformation is revealed: the movement of the possessor from the original dative to the attributive non-agentive position in possessive constructions, which contributes to the proof of the theoretical thesis about the restriction of the dative coding of the external possessor in Japanese. Special attention is paid to case variation of peripheral actants because case alternation in the design of high-agent and low-agent actants also demonstrate the importance of the propositional level of utterance and prototypical agential features. As a result of a complex study of the agential potential of peripheral actants it is confirmed that the processes of actant-predicate interaction are largely determined by the semantic features of not only the core, but also of the peripheral syntactic and semantic participants.

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