Psychological deictic –te kuru compared to passive: The case of victims’ stories in Japanese
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Harumi Minagawa
Abstract
Japanese is often said to be stronger than English in construing an event and reporting it from the subjective position. While the auxiliary verb –te kuru ‘COME’ is one of the deictic devices that reports an event from a subjective perspective, very limited attention has been given to the use of –te kuru when it denotes ‘psychological deixis’ (Sawada 2000). Using on-line postings of sexual harassment victims, this study examines how the psychological –te kuru expresses the victims’ experience subjectively particularly in comparison with the much-studied passive structure. While showing that the two syntactic structures would often be interchangeable in the data, the study reveals that when the victim feels powerless and subdued by the offender’s act upon her/him, only the passive is used, while if the victim has a sufficient sense of power to feel anger, –te kuru tends to be used. The study argues that the semantic traits of the passive [associated with the perfective aspect] and –te kuru [which is interpreted as ‘psychological inchoative’ in this study] are reflected in the choices made in the victims’ narratives.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Lexical V-V compounds in child Japanese: An experimental study
- Psychological deictic –te kuru compared to passive: The case of victims’ stories in Japanese
- Japanese pronoun hon-nin
- On the grammaticalization of Japanese verbal negative marker
- Onset Cy and High Vowel Devoicing in Japanese
- How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite
- Book Review
- Mineharu Nakayama Yi-ching Su Aijun Huang John Benjamins: Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Lexical V-V compounds in child Japanese: An experimental study
- Psychological deictic –te kuru compared to passive: The case of victims’ stories in Japanese
- Japanese pronoun hon-nin
- On the grammaticalization of Japanese verbal negative marker
- Onset Cy and High Vowel Devoicing in Japanese
- How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite
- Book Review
- Mineharu Nakayama Yi-ching Su Aijun Huang John Benjamins: Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain
