Paper short abstract:

Psychological verbs in Japanese and Spanish show a typological contrast and their corresponding verbs seem semantically different. In this talk I will demonstrate how this typological contrast affects Japanese learning and teaching in Spanish speaking environment.

Paper long abstract:

There is a typological contrast between psych(ological) verbs of Japanese and Spanish. In Japanese, they appear in the Experiencer-Subject construction (e.g. Maki-ga kaminari-ni odoroita ‘Maki got surprised at the thunder’) and many can undergo causativization (e.g. Kaminari-ga Maki-o odorok-ase-ta ‘The thunder surprised Maki). In Spanish, on the other hand, there are reflexive psychological verbs (e.g. María se asustó por el trueno ‘María got frightened at the thunder’) that are considered results of anticausativization on causative psych verbs (e.g. El trueno asustó a María ‘The thunder frightened María’). Psych verbs in these languages are derived with procedures that reversely mirror each other.

For Spanish speaking learners, Japanese psych verbs are difficult to learn. The reason stems from that a psychological state is expressed in the Experiencer-Object construction in Spanish, whereas it is lexicalized in the Experiencer-Subject construction in Japanese (cf. Talmy 1985). What happens for them, then, when it is natural to say Watashi-wa odorita ‘I got surprised’, they would say Watashi-o odorok-ase-ta, as a literally translation from (Eso) me sorprendió ‘It surprised me’ in Spanish. This also relates to Ikegami’s (1981) distinction between “do” languages and “become” languages (Deguchi 1982 and Fukushima 1990). Nevertheless, as Noda (1997) pointed out, this is not that all verbs in a language are lexicalized in a single pattern. The question is whether the corresponding expressions between languages are semantically equal. In this talk, I highlight the semantic differences between those psych verbs in question and I demonstrate how this typological contrast affects Japanese learning and teaching in Spanish speaking environment.

References: Deguchi, A. 1982. Supeingo: saiki keishiki o megutte. In Kouza nihongo 10: Gaikokugo to no taishou I. Meiji-Shoin. 305-318. Fukushima, N. 1990. Supeingo to nihongo: Kansetsu-eikyou-hyougen no taisyou. In Kouza nihongo to nihongo kyouiku. Meiji-Shoin. 197-218. Ikegami, Y. 1981. Suru to Naru no gengogaku. Taishukan. Noda, H. 1997. Nihongo to supeingo no boisu. In Niohongo to supeingo, 2. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. 83-113. Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Language typology and syntactic description III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge University Press. 57-149.