A unified account of the syntactic alternation phenomena in modern Japanese

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370527
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: Saitama University
• Principal Investigator: KAWANO Yasuko 埼玉大学, 人文社会科学研究科, 准教授 (00364159)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 格体制の交替 / 壁塗り代換 / 場所格交替 / 動詞 / 位置変化 / 状態変化

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The aim of this study is to provide a unified account of the syntactic alternation phenomena in modern Japanese, such as "kabe-ni penki-o nuru / kabe-o penki-de nuru (the locative alternation)." The conclusions are summarized as follows: (1) All these alternations arise as a result of a semantic type shift, in which the same objective event is linguistically conceptualized either as a change of location in which the manner of existence of the located entity is defined by the other entity, or as a change of state in which the external appearance of an entity changes through association with another entity while the attributes of the entity itself remain unchanged. (2) The types of the alternation are determined by the lower-level semantic types of the alternating verbs. (3) As (1) and (2) show, syntactic alternation phenomena can be explained in a unified way by assuming a hierarchy of verbs' semantic types and focusing on the lower-level semantic types.

Free Research Field

日本語学