TWO TYPES OF CAUSATIVES IN JAPANESE AND JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE: A STUDY IN SYNTAX AND ACQUISITION *

要旨

Causative verbs such as ‘make,’ ‘cause,’ ‘let,’ and ‘have’ express causative meanings by themselves. They form a causative sentence with an independent non-causative predicate which expresses a resultive event. This kind of causative is productive, and is derived by syntactic processes. Therefore, causatives in (1) are called syntactic causatives. In syntactic causatives, both of a causer ‘I’ and a causee ‘John’ behave as agents. Thus, syntactic causatives have biclausal structures. On the other hand, the causatives in (2) are called lexical causatives. In (2), transitive verbs, ‘open’ and ‘put,’ function as causative verbs. The causative and the resultive event are contained in the lexical item itself. In lexical causatives, only a causer ‘I’ behaves as an agent. Therefore, they have a mono-clausal structure. In this paper, we will discuss two types of causatives: syntactic and lexical causatives, in Japanese and Japanese Sign Language (JSL). We will present supportive evidence for Murasugi and Hashimoto’s (2004) (Henceforth, M&H) v-VP frame analysis on the acquisition of agentive verbs and two types of causatives in Japanese, and suggest that the property of small v is acquired very early. Together with the analysis of causatives in Japanese Sign Language, we will conclude that v is universal.

主題