On Interpretation of Resultative Phrases in Japanese
Tsuneko Nakazawa · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2012
The present paper attempts to formalize the semantic interpretation of resultative phrases in Japanese in the framework of Generative Lexicon, with a focus on the semantic subject of resultative phrases, i.e. the entity which resultative phrases are predicated of.The semantic subject cannot always be identified with the direct object of transitive verbs or the subject of unaccusative verbs, as generally believed, but also is expressed as an oblique NP or not syntactically expressed at all.It poses a challenge to the interpretation of resultative phrases since it cannot be tied to a specific syntactic constituent.The interpretation of resultative phrases is encoded in terms of the FORMAL quale and its argument built through the co-composition operation.