Abstract
Integrating Mental Space notions and transitivity elements, this paper discusses the phenomena of profiling a speaker’s identity in Japanese with reference to shading a speaker’s identity in English. There are three kinds of empathy prominent predicates in Japanese: giving/receiving verbs, psychological adjectivals, and cognitive verbs. These predicates require syntactic constraints with respect to empathy conditions, and these constraints have a strong correlation with transitivity. Employing a Mental Space framework (Fauconnier 1994, 1997) and ideas from this theory, I account for the phenomena as a manifestation of a single phenomenon. The key notions used in this study are viewpoint, empathy, blending, and transitivity.
I am indebted to Professors Roderick Jacobs, John Haig and Haruko Cook for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. The errors remaining are mine. I also would like to thank my friends who have supported me for this particular study: You-guang Ding, M.D., Given Tokunaga, Rev., Hirokuni Masuda, Ph.D., and Liane Louie, Ph.D.
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Kozai, S. (1999). A Mental Space Account for Speaker’s Empathy: Japanese Profiling Identity vs. English Shading Identity. In: Bouquet, P., Benerecetti, M., Serafini, L., Brézillon, P., Castellani, F. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48315-2_17
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