A Cognitive Contrastice Study of the Transitivity Model Basea on the Usage-Bassa Model

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The aim of the research this year was to study those phenomena in which noun phrases which would not be integrated into the event in unmarked event construal are integrated into the clause structure as participants of events by analyzing non-prototypical transitive sentences and their related constructions. This was because by focusing on such phenomena which exhibit properties of transitive events in many respects despite their non-prototypical transitive status, it was expected to be made possible to see more clearly the difference between languages in how the event is construed which would be more difficult to see in prototypical transitive events, as well as universal aspects behind such diversity, and to reveal the mechanisms operative in transitivity phenomena left unstudied by previous research. The second paper on the "Journal Papers" list was based on research conducted along these lines and have shown that affectedness and transitivity, which have traditionally been regarded as diametrically different from each other, are in fact not necessarily so, by analyzing the Japanese adversative passive construction. The first and the fifth papers on the "Journal Papers" list attempt to delve deeper into transitivity phenomena from a viewpoint of metonymy.As a conclusion to this three-year research project, we have attempted to make theoretical foundations for research on transitivity more solid by reconsidering the notion of transitivity from more general, theoretical viewpoints. The third paper on the "Journal Papers" list have reexamined the notion of subject, and the fourth paper have discussed the nature of predicates. We have also reconsidered voice phenomena and transitivity in general, and the result is the sixth paper on the "Journal Papers" list.