Transitivity in the Japanese Language: Cognitive Approach to Description

The grammatical category of transition is one of the most common in modern languages of the world. In traditional grammars, transitivity is seen as the ability of a verb to control the object. However, the structural description does not give an understanding of why this linguistic phenomenon is so widely represented and what does it matter in human experience; whether the functioning of transitivity is universal for all languages and, if no, what could be the explanation of these differences. In our study we investigate the cognitive approach to the description of transitivity, since it allows to understand the causes of certain language transformations. We also identify the concept of cognitive-linguistic norms and through its prism we aim to explore the category of transition in the Japanese language. The relevance of our research lies in the description of verbal transitional structures with a somatic component that were not studied previously. Also, we analyze this linguistic phenomenon by describing it within the framework of a cognitive-linguistic norm and come to the conclusion that, despite the apparent discrepancy, transitional verbs with a somatic component complement the idea of the Japanese language picture of the world.