A lexical semantic approach to Japanese adverbial modification

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370508
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: Fukushima University
• Principal Investigator: IMOTO Ryo 福島大学, 経済経営学類, 教授 (20361280)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 情態修飾 / 連用修飾 / 副詞的修飾 / 結果構文 / 形容詞 / 語彙意味論 / 日本語教育文法 / コーパス

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The aim of this research project is to explore the semantic diversity of adverbial modification construction (AMC) with lexical semantic approach. During the research period, I exemplified the following. First, the adverbial “akaku” (redly) modifies not only COLOR, but also OUTER-SURFACE in the “Akaku V” construction, which makes “to swell red” grammatical. Second, among Japanese as Second Language learners, the degree reading of AMC has a significantly lower score than the other readings although this degree reading appears in the corpora most frequently. Third, the adjectives of material property such as “okiku” (big) have the degree reading that was hardly observed in the previous literatures. Fourth, Japanese resultative construction and AMC share the common semantic function called “further-specification.” This constructional function motivates the diverse readings of ACM. The results of this study would encourage further research on the cross-semantic phenomena of ACM.

Free Research Field

現代日本語の情態修飾、連用修飾、結果構文、動詞意味論