TRANSITIVE ALTERNATION AND THE COMPOSITIONALITY OF THE EVENT STRUCTURES DENOTED BY PREDICATES

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In the tradition of the Generative. Semantics starting from the early 1970s, the meanings of predicates are subject to further decomposition, by which those components which are shared by the predicates of the same semantics class and those specific to individual predicates are extracted. The former meaning components determine the syntactic behavior of the predicates. On this lexico-semantic assumption, our research program takes up causative verbs and the related intransitives in English and Japanese, and aims to make clear the mechanism of causative alternation, based on the fine grained semantic analysis of these verbs. Causative alternation is the process where the same verb can appear both in the causative transitive construction and the intransitive construction as in John opened the door. /The door opened. ; To-o akeru/To-ga aku. Our program eventually found the following.1. The two causation types, Onset and Extended, are crucially involved in the causative alternation both in English and Japanese.2. According to the Lexical Semantics, all the relevant factors determining the syntactic structures are restricted to the lexicon. We have shown, however, this thesis is inappropriate. There are cases where the combination of verb semantics and the other semantic aspects of a sentence determines the possibility of the causative alternation.3. The aspectual properties of a sentence is cleared from the verb semantics and related factors.