ABSTRACT

A number of scholars have noted that contact with English has changed the Japanese language in a process of Englishization. While the most profound effects of Englishization may be seen in the influx of new lexemes, deeper structural changes to Japanese syntactic structures and phonology have not been observed with great regularity. A review of previous research on Englishization suggests that syntactic effects of Englishization in Japanese are to be expected. The Japanese ukemi ‘passive’ voice construction has been hypothesized to have been Englishized and close attention is given to those claims. This article examines a corpus of news media texts that can be divided into two sub-corpora: those written in Japanese and those translated from English into Japanese. The indirect passive appears more frequently in texts written in Japanese and in the sub-corpus of translated Japanese its use is limited by the types of verbs that are passivized. The sociolinguistic nature of English in Japan, where the language is taught to nearly every student in the country, suggests that Englishization effects on the passive construction produce contact-induced variation that could be the earliest signs of change in progress.

摘要

许多学者指出，在英语化的过程中，与英语的接触改变了日语。虽然在新词素的涌入中可以看到英语化最深远的影响，但尚未有规律地观察到日语句法结构和语音学的更深层次结构变化。对以往英语化研究的回顾表明，日语中英语化的句法效果是可以预期的。日本ukemi假设“被动”语音结构已被英语化，并且对这些声明给予了密切关注。本文考察了一个新闻媒体文本语料库，该语料库可分为两个子语料库：用日语编写的语料库和从英语翻译成日语的语料库。间接被动语在日语文本中出现的频率更高，在日语翻译的子语料库中，它的使用受到被钝化的动词类型的限制。日本几乎所有学生都教授英语，日本英语的社会语言学性质表明，英语化对被动结构的影响会产生接触引起的变化，这可能是进步的最早迹象。