A Lexical-Semantic Approach to the Interaction between Voice and Aspect

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The goal of the present project is to make explicit the relationship between voice and aspect, which are mainly concerned with the form and meaning of verbs, by means of the analytical tools developed in the recent lexical-semantic investigations. Voice, as defined here, means the opposition between "transitive-intransitive" usage of verbs, in addition to the well-known "active -passive" oppositions. Aspect is also conceived either as grammatical aspect, perfective-imperfective, or as lexical aspect, telic-atelic. Both of the grammatical categories, voice and aspect, have in effect two layered structures, i.e. grammatical level and lexical level.In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, each member of this research project has worked on different (but of course closely related) topics. As the head of the project, Ono has integrated the resulting analyses of the project members. He has examined the relationship between voice and aspect from the perspective of matching lexical meanings with constructional meanings. He has reported the results at conferences and written papers on this topic. Suga has written a paper about the transitivity and intransitivity of aspectual verbs in Japanese. Maruta has discussed in his papers the causative alternations in relation to the lexical aspect of verbs. Uehara has presented an analysis which exploits a cognitive notion "stubjectivity" and shown how it is associated with voice phenomena.