A Distributed Morphology Study of Tense, Modal, and Wordhood in Japanese

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K16758
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: TAGAWA Takumi 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 助教 (20634447)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 時制 / 動詞の活用 / 動名詞 / 語種 / 形態的複雑性 / 語性 / 格 / 分散形態論

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study proposes a formal approach to tense, modal, and wordhood and their morphosyntactic natures in Japanese by using Distributed Morphology, which gives a sophisticated morpheme-based morphological model and syntactic solutions. The main achievements are as follows: 1) there are complex relations between infinitive or non-past form and syntactic structure even in disjunctive coordination clauses, 2) a contrastive study of foreign verbal nouns and Sino-Japanese verbal nouns reveals that a relation between morphological complexity and syntactic structure, and wordhood is not simple, 3) an analysis of adverbial prefixes proves the existence of Root in Distributed Morphology.

Free Research Field

理論言語学（形態論）