A Modular account of a lexical item with multiple constructional realizations : The case of ar(u)(第5回コロキアム)(2002年度KUIS-CLS言語学コロキアム報告)

概要

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In this talk, I focus on constructions involving the copula ar(u) in Japanese and their counterparts in English, and pursue a modular account of them, referring crucially to the issue of have/be alternation. Specifically, I investigate four cases in Japanese in which a single lexical item yields two different grammatical uses, namely, existential/locational and possessive uses of ar(u), active and passive uses of ar(u)-perfective constructions, direct and indirect rare(ru)-passives, and "change of location" and "change of possession" uses of verbs of giving, and show that they all originate from dual syntactic properties of ar(u). To account for their cross-constructional similarities and differences uniformly, I propose that ar(u) allows two different syntactic structures; the unaccusative one and the transitive one containing a functional light verb with a special Case property that takes an external argument in its Spec and the unaccusative part of ar(u) in its complement. Furthermore, I point out that the two uses in all of these four Japanese cases correspond to the distinction between have and be in English, and provide a parametric account of some important differences between ar(u) in Japanese and have/be in English.
神田外語大学の論文
2003-03-25