Phrasal Compounds In Japanese

要旨

Although Japanese does not have phrasal compounds analogous to English an over the fence gossip or a who’s the boss wink, it does have phrasal compounds like kireena mati-dukuri, literally ‘clean city-making,’ meaning construction of a clean city. This example illustrates one of several types of phrasal compounds in Japanese. The criteria that classify phrasal compounds in Japanese are (i) whether the head of the compound is a predicate, (ii) if a predicate, whether the head is of Sino-Japanese or of native origin, (iii) if not a predicate, whether the compound involves coordination or cliticization. One source of phrasal compounding is noun incorporation. When an argument incorporates into a Sino-Japanese verbal noun predicate, we get what Shibatani & Kageyama (1988) refer to as post-syntactic compounds, which have phrasal ac- cent. In contrast, when an argument incorporates into a verbal noun predicate of native origin, we get a phrasal compound with word accent. The phrasal nature is evidenced by modifier stranding, and there are some conditions (e.g., pragmatic factors like cliché) on modifier stranding. There are three other sources of phrasal compounding which do not involve noun incorporation: natural coordination, en- clitics, and proclitics. The first two have word accent and the last has phrasal ac- cent. Whether a compound has word accent or phrasal accent is predicted by its structure: right branching compounds have phrasal accent (Kubozono 1995; 2005). Kageyama’s (1993; 2001; 2009) notion of Word Plus is reconsidered and reclassified into three distinct classes: right-branching compounds, constructions involving proclitics, and phrases involving genitive deletion.

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