Toward an explanation of the properties of semantically light verbs in terms of a process-oriented theory of grammar

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K02757
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo Gakugei University
• Principal Investigator: SUZUKI Takeru 東京学芸大学, 教育学部, 教授 (00187741)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: Semantically light verbs / Path prepositions / Particles / Satellite-/verb-framed / Lexical Subordination / Process-oriented / Developmental

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research has the following crucial findings. (1) PathPPs appear frequently and without any cooccurring verb at the very early stages of language acquisition and later. As such, PathPPs function as predicates that express change of location. Most of the relevant utterances are requests to move something and thus are implicitly causative. Verbs appear later than PathPPs. The first verbs that appear with PathPPs are semantically light verbs such as put, take, turn, and so on. They do not directly contribute to the meaning of change of location. The next verbs that appear are manner verbs such as those in pull it away and throw it down. The third verbs are need, want and the like. (2) Most of the first PathP that appear are telic (in, on, off, etc.). Atelic ones such as around and along are infrequent and, if any, are adverbial modifiers of verbs, not predicates.

Free Research Field

英語学　生成文法理論

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究は、まず移動に関するV＋DP＋Prt/PathPP の構文に関して、CHILDESのデータに基づいて、一般性が高い獲得順序を明らかにした。類型論的にも、言語におけるPathPの有無・PathPの獲得順序からLexical Subordination (Levin and Rapoport 1988)とsatellite-framing of Path (Talmy 1985他) が説明される可能性を示した。また、V-DP-PrtとV-Prt-DP (句動詞）は似ていることから学校で一緒に教えられることがあるが、後者は、獲得初期にはほとんど現れないなど、重要な違いを明らかにした。