著者

高島 彬

出版者

金沢大学大学院人間社会環境研究科 = Graduate School of Human and Socio-Enviromental Studies Kanazawa University

雑誌

人間社会環境研究 = Human and socio-environmental studies (ISSN:18815545)

巻号頁・発行日

no.30, pp.77-89, 2015-09-28

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This article examines the grammaticalization of 'te-aru' constructions in Japanese. In Japanese, 'te­aru' constructions can be divided into two subtypes, exemplified in (l-2). The first type (1) is the construction where the patient is encoded by the nominative maker ga. The second type (2) is the one where the patient is encoded by the accusative marker wo. (l) 'X-ga te-aru' construction (2) 'X-wo te-aru' construction Many linguists pointed out that the difference between ga and wo in the constructions affects not only the syntactic aspect but also the semantic one. There are two types of analysis of the different cases in 'te-aru' constructions. In the first type, the constructions are considered to be passive-like sentences (cf. Soejima 2007, Suda 2010). In the second type, constructions are considered to be causative alternations (i.e., the opposition between the intransitive construction is 'X-ga te-aru' and the transitive one is 'X-wo te-aru' ). I will take the latter position one step further and show that it can be analyzed as a matter of grammatical development. In this paper, I will analyze differences in these constructional types as grammatical development from the 'X-ga te-aru' construction into the 'X-wo te-aru' construction. The framework I use to tackle this problem is "specification," which Kuteva (2001) showed as a mechanism of semantic change in grammaticalization. I conclude that specifying the information ( especially, the information of the agent in the event) led to the grammatical development of 'te-aru' constructions.