| Research Abstract |
By investigating the semantic and syntactic structures of Japanese and English vocabularies, attempts have been made to develop an integrated theory of the lexicon with emphasis on verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Results are combined into the Project Report which comprises fourteen papers arranged in three parts. In Part I (The Lexicon and Syntax), it is demonstrated, first, that morphological rules apply not only to the lexicon but also to the syntactic component ; second, that there is a special morphological category called "Word Plus" that bridges between words and phrases ; and third, that the so-called argument inheritance is executed by the lexical conceptual structure of verbs and the qualia structure of nouns. In Part II (The Lexicon and the Semantic Structure of Verbs), it is shown that the nature of lexical diathesis alternation lies in semantic operations like anti-causativization, de-causativization, causativization, and locative promotion in lexical conceptual structure, and that the unified representation of physical location and abstract state in lexical conceptual structure provides evidence that language system is independent of psychological perceptions. In Part III (The Lexicon and the Semantic Structure of Nouns and Adjectives), it is suggested that the lexical conceptual structure representation of verbs be incorporated into the qualia structure representations of certain nouns and adjectives. This captures a significant generalization for verb nominalizations and other phenomena. It is also found that English can directly access the Telic and Agentive roles of nouns' qualia structure whereas Japanese refers to the semantic structure only indirectly by way of compounding and other morphological means. The study of nouns and adjectives in this project is admittedly preliminary and sketchy, and needs to be elaborated in the future.
|
