The Internal Structures of Adjectives in Japanese

要旨

Many studies have been made on the internal structures of verbs and nouns, but less is known about the internal structure of adjectives. A close examination of adjectives suggests that some adjectives have complex internal structures like items in other lexical categories. In this paper, I propose the internal structures of adjectives in Japanese in the framework of Distributed Morphology proposed by Marantz (1997 and subsequent work). I demonstrate that Japanese adjectives come in four types in terms of their syntactic and semantic properties, and claim that each type of adjectives has a different internal structure. This claim reveals that there is a close relationship between the internal structures of adjectives and their interpretations; the internal structure of adjectives determines their semantic type. This paper also demonstrates that there is a correlation to some extent between the morphology and the semantics of adjectives in Japanese.

主題