The organizational structure of lexical compound verbs in Japanese
Kiyoko Toratani · Studies in language companion series · 2017
Abstract This study offers a Construction Morphology account of the organizational structure of the class of lexical compound verbs in Japanese, covering two newly proposed types (thematic and aspectual compound verbs) ( Kageyama 2013 ) and two understudied types (prefixed and lexicalized type compound verbs), as an alternative to a traditional listing of types. It argues that compounds are arranged in two dimensions: one contains the inheritance hierarchy, with its root node diverging according to the position of the semantic head (for thematic, aspectual, and prefixed type compounds); the other covers compounds with extended senses (for the lexicalized type). The study also proposes constructional schemas for compound verbs (e.g. those with affixoids such as -hateru ‘completely’) to illustrate how they are organized in the inheritance hierarchy.