日英語対照研究 : 英語の受動表現と他動性を中心に

概要

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In this paper I intend to make clear the characteristics of the passive expression and transitivity in English ; English and Japanese ways of thinking will be contrasted. The basic sentence structure of English is 'S+V+O', whereas that of Japanise is 'S+V'. This shows English prefers transitive verbs to intrasitive ones and that in English sentences, actor-action-goal type sentences are more frequent than in Japanese. 'S' singnifies something / someone that / who takes action ; O, something that receives the action. This means that in English, transitivity of the subject for the object is clearly shown in many transitive sentences. But, one must pay special attention when putting transitive sentences of English into the passive voice. The passive voice has an important and special place in English. As Allen says, most sentences that are good in the active voice are just grotesque curiosities when put into the passive voice. For example, it would be impossible to put 'He likes beer.' 'I can't hear you.' (SVO) etc. into 'Beer is liked by him.' 'You can't be heard by me.' etc. This is because the action itself in certain verbs is not so prominent, that is, transitivity of the subject for the action is not so high. Whether it is possible or not to turn transitive sentences into the passive voice mainly depends on the strength of transitivity as a semantic feature.
東海大学の論文
1996-03-30