A contrastive study on the cognitive scheme in the realization of the accusative case between Japanese and German

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research aims to describe the cognitive mechanism in the realization of the accusative case of Japanese and German through corpus linguistic analyses. In the years of 2003 and 2004 I made a theoretical framework of the research first and then collected a variety of linguistic samples which show the opposition between the accusative and other cases especially such as the dative and prepositional phrases. These samples enabled me to observe a number of factors affecting the realization of the accusative.As results of this research I published the following articles :In Seino (2005), "Pladoyer fur eine Grauchsbasierte Satzsemantik-Einge neue Valenztheorie" (Proposal for the usage-based sentence semantics), I pointed out that the traditional valence theory could not represent the real usage of words, because it was too much concerned with the distinction between obligatory and optional complements. I consequently proposed a new valency theory based on frequency of usages in corpora.In … More Seino (2004), "Die Experiencer-Codierung im Deutschen und im Japanischen" (The Experiencer-Coding in German and Japanese), I argued two points. Firstly the coding of the human beings affected by the event is necessary in German, while the affectedness of the human being is often incorporated in the meanings of verbs and adjectives in Japanese. Sencondly this difference of the experiencer coding has a direct effect on the sentence structures in both languages.In Seino and Tanaka (2006), "The ‘passive' voice in Japanese and German" I observed passive sentences in both languages and pointed out that German and Japanese passive sentences are similar in terms of the reducing of "transitivity", but at the same time they are different in that German passive sentences are built by eliminating an argument (the subject of the active sentence) while Japanese passive sentences are produced in the process of adding an argument which becomes the subject of the passive sentences to the active sentencesBesides these publications I collected a lot of sample sentences in German and Japanese which contain accusative, dative and prepositional phrases and made a data base where only partial data are represented in this report. Less