Acquisition of Japanese verbal compounding: Theoretical and experimental studies

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02510
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music
• Principal Investigator: Isobe Miwa 東京藝術大学, 言語・音声トレーニングセンター, 准教授 (00449018)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 岡部 玲子 日本大学, 法学部, 准教授 (60512358)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 言語獲得 / 複合動詞 / 動詞複合

Outline of Final Research Achievements

It is widely known that verbal compounds (hereafter “V-V compounds”) which consist of two verbs but function in the same way as single verbs are available in some East Asian languages. Among them, Japanese allows the richest variety of V-V compounds, and many theoretical studies have shown that V-V compounds in Japanese can be divided into two types: lexical and syntactic V-V compounds.
The aim of this research project was to elucidate how Japanese-speaking children acquire these two types of V-V compounds. Our experiment revealed that there is a developmental stage in which lexical V-V compounds are already acquired while syntactic ones are not. Our corpus analysis also found that children acquire lexical V-V compounds and creative nominal compounds at around the same time. Based on these findings, we propose that the Compounding Parameter (e.g., Snyder 2007) regulates the availability of lexical V-V compounds, as well as nominal compounds and other complex predicates.

Free Research Field

心理言語学