著者

高橋 英也

出版者

岩手県立大学

雑誌

リベラル・アーツ (ISSN:18816746)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.1-20, 2013

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This paper is an attempt to provide a morphosyntactic analysis of resultative constructions in Japanese within the current Minimalist framework proposed in Chomsky (2008). Specifically, we argue that resultatives in Japanese are not to be analyzed as predicates, in spite of the tradition in the literature; rather,they are morphologically, as well as functionally, adverbial modifiers, which is considered to be valid in light of the fact that Japanese is an agglutinative language. In particular, we first argue for Mihara's (2008) proposal that Japanese resultatives are to be divided into two types (PPs and APs), and then propose that the syntactic and semantic differences between them can be given a natural and unified account in terms of the application of labeling algorithms on External Merge. We show in the second half of this paper that the proposed adverbial analysis of Japanese resultatives has an additional empirical advantage in that it can correctly predict various facts which emerge from the comparison of English and Japanese resultatives, including those which would even be mysterious under previous analyses, solely based on the apparent structural parallelism between the two languages.