Lexical V-V Compounds in Japanese: Lexicon vs. Syntax

One of the central issues in morphology/morphosyntax has been the locus of the mechanisms responsible for word formation. LEXICALISM claims that the mechanisms employed forwor d formation are distinct from those found in other domains (e.g. syntax). I examine in this article so-called 'lexical' V-V compound formation in Japanese from a lexicalist point of view and show that it is indeed LEXICAL (some claim that it is syntactic). Though Japanese V-V compounds have been studied extensively, a principled and unified account has not been proposed due to their complexities, especially one that deals with the question of how arguments of component verbs are to be synthesized into a single argument structure. The current proposal embodies the notion of THEMATIC PROTO-ROLE and devises semantically driven argument matching giving rise to an argument structure of a V-V compound as a whole. In such a process, syntactic apparatuses or grammatical relations per se play no central role.