The organizational structure of lexical compound verbs in Japanese

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.