- 著者
-
清水 嘉隆
- 出版者
- 東海大学
- 雑誌
- 東海大学紀要. 開発工学部 (ISSN:09177612)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.3, pp.67-78, 1994-03-30
This paper mainly intends to make clear the characteristics of transitive and intransitive expressions in English based on the consideration of English and Japanese ways of thinking. It has already been said that English is linguistically called a 'Do language' or a 'Have-language', while Japanese is a 'Become-language' or a 'Be-language'. This shows that English prefers transitive verbs to intransitive ones. In other words, the basic sentence structure of English is characteristic of SVO style, whereas these English sentences of SVO style are often expressed by SV style in Japanese. English is a language that forms the basis of the remarkable contrast between the subject and the object, but Japanese is a language that is based on the non-contrast between them. It can be also pointed out that many Japanese intransitive verbs have spontaneous generative implications. There-fore, they have a tendency to leave a matter to take its own course. In English the form of description is generally objective and logical, whereas in Japanese the emotional feeling is very strong. English is said to be a person-oriented language and Japanese is a status-oriented one. It follows that in English a person is frequently used as the subject, while in Japanese it is not necessarily employed and the object in English often becomes the subject in Japanese. Also, in English special attention is paid to the role of nouns. One of the reasons why transitive verbs are frequently used in English is that English prefers nominal constructions to verbal ones. This means that the subject and the object are strongly connected to each other.