Агентивность японских результативных конструкций: скрытый деятель и семантика состояния
Agentivity of Japanese resultatives: implicit actor and state semantics

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with Japanese resultatives in terms of the degree of prototypical agentive characteristics expressed by their participants. The research material was Japanese lexical verb pairs with regular semantic correspondence, in which an intransitive verb is opposed by a transitive verb. Such semantic pairing makes it possible to compare aspectual verb constructions with different agentive loads based on the same root morpheme. Quantitative analysis of the corpus material and its grammatical interpretation, including commentaries of the native speakers, showed that Japanese is characterized by using subjective resultative constructions which reflects the natural development of events, eliminating the volitivity and defocusing the actor. Discovering significant discrepancies in the indicators of performance within and beyond lexical pairs made it possible to top up the complex of agentive features with the criterion of the non-pairing of Japanese transitive verbs. Furthermore, the study of non-canonical resultatives proved the importance of the criterion of the observable verification of a “product” as the result of the object’s impact as well as of the “effect” of the completed event, resulting in the new state of the original object either animate or inanimate. Special attention was paid to the classes of verbs of mental influence, movement, and other predicates that are ambiguously interpreted in a typological perspective. The constructed agentivity scale of resultatives was correlated with the ‘state-action’ space, which made it possible to determine the ontological essence of the dominant type of resultative in Japanese.

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