Syntactic and semantic complexity of lexical compounds: An analysis of komu, dasu, and saru compounds in Japanese.

摘要

This dissertation examines a set of lexical compounds in Japanese that exhibit particular syntactic and semantic properties that appear to violate normal constraints on lexical compound formation.; Kageyama (1993, 1996) claims that the amalgamation processes of Japanese lexical compounds with two verbal morphemes can be accounted for in terms of their argument structures and his Transitivity Harmony Principle . However, the amalgamation processes of some lexical compounds, such as those with komu 'to get into/do thoroughly', dasu 'to begin/start/be out of/leave', and saru 'to leave/be away,' cannot be explained with this constraint.; This dissertation argues that this is due to the grammaticalization of these morphemes in their compounds. First, as the second component in their compounds, these morphemes have bleached out their original grammatical properties, such as transitivity and unaccusativity, instead of retaining them, and these morphemes do not carry their argument structures in their compounds. Second, despite the bleaching of their syntactic properties, these morphemes consistently trigger certain semantic properties, such as aspectuality and directionality, and they still play an important role in lexical compounds. Because of the syntactic and semantic factors of these morphemes, this dissertation calls them "bound verbs." Not only are these morphemes productive in the second positions in their compounds but also they demonstrate a unique and complicated range of syntactic and semantic behaviors.