A historical-corpus-based syntactic approach to the grammaticalization of Japanese verbs and adjectives

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520526
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: OGAWA Yoshiki 東北大学, 情報科学研究科, 教授 (20322977)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): NIINUMA Fumikazu 盛岡大学, 栄養科学部, 准教授 (40369814)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 文法化 / 構文化 / 複合動詞 / 複合名詞 / 合成性 / 分散形態論 / 前置詞 / アスペクト

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Japanese V-V compounds have so far received dual analyses: one approach, mainly advocated in traditional Japanese linguistics, claims that the second element of a V-V compound, if grammaticalized, is an affix or an auxiliary verb, while the other one, mainly advocated in generative linguistics, claims that it is always a main verb. With this background, we have provided several generative-linguistic arguments showing that such a lexeme is a functional category located somewhere in the universal functional hierarchy.
The research leader also established a research unit named "Language Change and Language Variation Research Unit" in 2013 as a forum for the collaboration between theoretical linguists and corpus linguists. And in its activities, we have elucidated a syntactic mechanism of how diachronic grammaticalization and/or constructionalization proceed from adjective to preposition, from adverb to aspectual functional categories, from N-N compounds to noun phrases, and so on.

Free Research Field

形態統語論、文法化、語彙意味論