The passive construction in Japanese: A cognitive perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the passive construction in Japanese. Focusing on the behavior of two types of by-phrase, ni and ni yotte, it is argued that the essential components that trigger the passive construction cannot be determined on the basis of structural properties such as ‘the suppression of an external argument’ or ‘defocusing the agent’. Rather, its formation is influenced mostly by factors which accord with a cognitive approach to language, in which our subjective judgment or experience of the world comes to the fore in the determination of the grammaticality of clausal structures. More precisely, the aforementioned observation suggests that the formation of Japanese passives requires more than purely structural or syntactic information. The paper further argues that the notion of EMPATHY, though it is often alluded to as being of primacy in Japanese passives in the previous literature, is still not sufficient in the light of the data at hand. The paper proposes five cognitive components, TEMPORALITY, DEPENDENCY, INVOLVEMENT, TYPICALITY, and SALIENCE, revealing that the grammaticality of Japanese passives is determined crucially by multiple human conceptualization.