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 for word 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.