Japanese Ditransitive Verbs and the Hierarchical Lexicon

摘要

In this paper, I will utilize the notion of integrating linking and the hierarchical lexicon (Davis (2001)) in accounting for certain aspects of syntactic and semantic patterning in the ditransitive constructions in Japanese. I will suggest certain classes for the major ditransitive verbs and formulate those feature specifications under the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag et al. (2003)). The major phenomena discussed in this paper include the two alternants of a ditransitive verb, ditransitive and monotransitive with to, contrary to the standard analysis (Hoji (1985)). Japanese ditransitive verbs are divided into two groups, depending on whether they encode a motion or a possession of an entity.