A Research on the Event Structure of Japanese and English Based on the Cognitive-Typological Approach

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The present research has been focused on the role of "event structure" in the typological study of Japanese and English from a cognitive perspective. The idea of representing or capturing meanings in terms of "event structure" has been around for decades in linguistic research. The term is adopted in both of the major schools of modern semantics - formal semantics and cognitive semantics. In the former, the event structure is represented in terms of the so-called Davidsonian event variable in logical forms. And in the latter, the event structure is embedded in the idea of Ideal Cognitive Model (ICM) proposed in Lakoff's and Croft's works. Furthermore, in the realm of Lexical Semantics, the notion of event structure plays a crucial role in Levin and Rappaport's verb semantics and Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon.With this theoretical background, this research project was planned to explore the possibility of accounting for some typological aspects of English and Japanese from a cognitiv … More e-semantic point of view. In particular, the following three questions are posited for central themes of the research:(1) What are the conceptual foundations in the formation of event structure.(2) What are the interface conditions under which lexical meanings and constructional meanings are connected with each other?(3) What are the typological differences in the interaction of event structure with grammatical constructions in English and Japanese?With these three questions at hand, the project researchers have rigorously worked on each research topic during the research period, and published 3 books and 21 research papers. The first outcome of the research is concerned with a comparative study of the passive construction, the motion and change construction, and the resultative construction of English and Japanese, which have been conducted mainly by Naoyuki Ono. The second outcome is the explication of the notion "subjectivity", which has been studied from cognitive and functional perspectives by Kaoru Horie and Satoshi Uehara. Two book chapters and four research papers are included in the report to show that the research project provides solutions to the problems raised above. Less