Word Formation

要旨

A long-standing debate in generative grammar concerns the Lexicalist Hypothesis, the strongest form of which demands complete separation of morphology from syntax, thereby disallowing active interactions of word formation and syntactic operations. Such a hypothesis confronts serious challenges from an agglutinative language like Japanese, where one suffix after another is productively added to a verb stem to give rise to more and more complex predicates, as in tabe-hazime(-ru) “eat-begin” = “begin to eat,” tabe-hazime-sase(-ru) “eat-begin-cause” = “make (someone) begin to eat,” and tabe-hazime-sase-ta(-i) “eat-begin-cause-want” = “want to make (someone) begin to eat.” This chapter will review issues in Japanese word formation which directly pertain to the evaluation of the Lexicalist Hypothesis. Included in my discussion are Verb+Verb compounds, Noun+Verbal Noun compounds, and Verbal Noun+suru compounds. Space limitations prevent me from looking into other topics of theoretical interest in the realm of lexical morphology, such as N-N compounding (e.g. inu-goya “dog-house”), A-N compounding (e.g. aka-boo “redcap”), nominalization (e.g. ame-huri “rainfall”), lexical prefixation and suffixation (e.g. sai-kakunin “re-assure,” niga-mi “bitterness”), clipping (e.g. siritu-daigaku “private universities” → si-dai), and reduplication (e.g. (biiru-o) nomi-nomi “while drinking beer”). For the topics that are not included in this chapter as well as the basics of Japanese morphology, the reader is referred to Kageyama, Shibatani and Tsujimura.

主題