Universality of scale structures: Evidence from quantified expressions in Japanese and English

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23720220
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Osaka University (2015); Osaka Medical College (2011-2014)
• Principal Investigator: Minami Eri (田中英理) 大阪大学, 文学研究科, 准教授 (40452685)
• Project Period (FY): 2011-04-28 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: スケール / 動詞 / measure phrases

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This project aimed at answering the question if we can apply scale structures proposed for gradable adjectives in the literature to other syntactic-semantic domains including verbal and prepositional domains. To achieve this goal, I examined the distributions of two types of measure phrases in English, degree adverbs both in English and Japanese, and comparative structures.
The distribution of measure phrases and degree adverbs point to a similar structure in verbal domains as the one in gradable adjectives: some verbs accept only bare MPs, while others accept by-MPs as well, and those that accept by-MPs coincide with the distribution of "slightly", which is an indicator of the minimum element on a scale. I also propose that verbs, unlike adjectives, do not lexicalize degrees, but they are converted to a "scalar" predicate syntactically.

Free Research Field

英語学、意味論