2024 Volume 166 Pages 87-111
Instrument verb formation is very productive in English (e.g., knifeV the man), whereas it is restricted in some way in Japanese (e.g., *naihu-(su)ru ‘to knife’). From the perspective of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, among others), this study observes that central to the formation of instrument verbs is to associate a certain scene with a thing named by a parent noun (i.e., a noun to be converted into a verb), arguing that this difference in productivity between English and Japanese reflects their unique manner of linguistic encoding which is motivated by their basic egocentricity (Hirose 2000). More precisely, in Japanese as a private-self-centered language, encoders must overtly encode how the parent-noun participant is associated with (or used in) a scene (e.g., naihu-de-kiru/sasu/osô ‘to cut/stab/attack with a knife’), which corresponds to the “off-stage” (Boas 2003) information with respect to the scene. By contrast, in English as a public-self-centered language, decoders can view the associated scene on a par with the encoder and thus activate off-stage information as to how and for what purpose the parent-noun participant is used within the scene, even without overt linguistic encoding of the relevant information. As a result, Japanese “exceptional” instrument verbs (e.g., hôtyô-suru, hottikisu-suru), even if occurring seemingly at random, are classified in a principled way as follows: (i) register-specific instrument verbs that presuppose who is talking to whom and (ii) what Hirose (inter alia 2000) calls “private expressions” that may be employed as a strategy to express intimacy to the addressee.
