Agentivity in the Works of Japanese Linguists: Historical Background and Current State

Abstract

The article analyzes the understanding of agentivity by Japanese linguists both during the historical formation of this concept and in the context of the current functioning of this semantic category in the Japanese language. Agentivity is an important linguistic universal that influences the formation of both deep and surface syntactic structures, ultimately determining the characteristics of any linguistic structure. The current level of linguistic knowledge about how agentivity is represented in the Japanese linguistic discourse could be considered as insufficient; it does not provide a systematic understanding of the features of the Japanese perception of agency, even though the structure of the hierarchical relations of semantic and syntactic actants with the predicate in the Japanese language determines the functioning of all key grammatical categories. An array of Japanese-language and partly English-language works has been studied for more than 100 years, from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 21th century to perform several tasks: to determine the essence of the concept of “agency” in Japanese terminology; to identify and systematize the linguistic phenomena described by Japanese linguists to be determined by the agentive characteristics of the event participants; to clarify the significance of agentive features for various grammatical categories. It has been found that Japanese linguists are unanimously of the opinion that Japanese tends to exhibit low-agent properties which are expressed in the structure of Japanese voice, in the system of Japanese polite verbs, in the case marking of actants, in desiderative and potential constructions, etc. As further prospects for study, we see the investigation of Japanese-language linguistic papers on the role of agentive features in the formation of Japanese vocabulary and further systematization of agentive characteristics in the morphosyntactic aspect.