A Study on Non-human Subjects in English

초록

This study aims to identify a language-specific tendency that characterizes the transitive use of non-human subjects in English, and explore a relation between the subjecthood of non-human subjects and syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. On a sematic level, thanks to category extensions, the prototypicality of non-human subjects in English can be projected onto a wider range of categories. Accordingly, English, as a subject-prominent, and also as an agent-oriented language, does not impose any syntactic or semantic constraints on the transitive use of non-human subjects. On a pragmatic level, the extensive use of less prototypcial transitive sentences in English discourse reflects a pragmatically-oriented strategy for the choice of non-human subjects in transitive events. The findings show that in both written and spoken English discourse, non-human subjects are strategically exploited for the purpose of maintaining a conversation topic and conveying the speaker’s attitude or preference. Finally, this study suggests that the tendency to exploit ‘nonhuman subject-action-patient’ in English should be recognized as one of the reflexes of its language-specific conventions that are frequently used in English discourse in a pragmatically-oriented way.

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