Japanese Diary 41: What do they know of English, who only English know?

[steepholm]

Being made to think about the hidden rules of English is a major side-benefit of learning Japanese. The other day I watched a helpful Youtube video about the passive voice. Now, I'd learned the grammatical form of the Japanese passive a while ago, but I hadn't taken in how differently it's used

Comments

[nightspore]

I think it might be related a little to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language

Just a little. I once read up on ergatives. In English there are a very few nouns that look like direct objects because they're formed the way you form a direct or indirect object, but they can still be subjects of the sentence. You could think of a word like honoree, as in "the honoree gave a speech," but that might be too close to just using a participle as a noun ("the honored deserve it").

But (I think this is the locus classicus in English) words like standee and attendee (maybe this is actually in American, not English) are formed like direct objects of the verbs that they are back-formations of but they're clearly not direct objects but subjects. But they're constituted as subjects out of verbs that they're also not quite doing -- or rather they might be doing them, but the words don't give a sense of action,

[heleninwales]

That is an interesting point. There are some examples where we'd normally only use one construction, e.g. "The abbey was built..." and others where'd we'd normally use the other, e.g. "Someone has eaten the cheese that was supposed to be for lunch." Using the opposite construction in either of those examples sounds rather odd, though of course still grammatically correct.

Then there are cases where you could use either, they both feel fine but the meaning is subtly different. E.g. "He was shot while walking down the street," as opposed to, "Someone shot him while he was walking down the street."

When I was doing my dissertation on teaching Welsh to adults, there was a woman doing research from Cardiff University on what she was calling "formulaic language." Basically (if I understand it correctly) we say things in certain ways just because we do.