Verb Semantics and Argument Realization in Pre-Modern Japanese: A Preliminary Study of Compound Verbs in Old Japanese

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  • 日本語史における動詞の意味構造と項の具現化

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<p>This paper introduces the collaborative corpus-based research project Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese. As part of the project, we are developing a corpus of pre-modern Japanese texts which is encoded with grammatical, and in particular syntactic, information and we here present two pilot studies based on the corpus, concerning verb-verb (V1-V2) compounds in Old Japanese (8th century). We first focus on V2s, with a view to understanding what properties are characteristic of the loosely defined class of ‘auxiliary verbs’ (hojodōshi補助動詞). We apply a number of tests to compounds, including for lexical integrity and transitivity harmony, and thereby identify a number of V2s that can take part in ‘non-lexical compounds’ (compounds relatively unconstrained by the semantics of their component verbs), as well as some distributional and combinatory patterns typical of non-lexical compounds. Second, we examine a single high-frequency verb, omop- ‘think, feel’, in order to examine its argument-taking properties when used as a predicate alone and when used as a V1 in a compound. We identify interesting differences, in particular finding that omop-V2 compounds are less likely to take clausal complements than when omop- is used as a predicate on its own.*</p>

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