On individuals and events in the lexical semantic structures of predicates : with special reference to the notion of affectedness

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This project has closely observed a range of grammatical phenomena, which have been analyzed as idiosyncratic ones due to their seemingly irregular way of case-marking, and tried to find out and formalize the underlying rules which seem to govern their peculiar case-marking system. Based upon our descriptive works on causative/passive have in English, a group of Japanese verbs taking Patient subjects," free dative" phenomena in German, we have proposed the novel semantic function POSS, which formalizes the relationship between Individual and Event on the lexical semantic representation of verbs. Also, we have shown that our analysis based upon the function POSS gives further insights into case-marking of individuals which are involved in the event, and non-thematic individuals which are regarded as existing outside of the event, and indirectly affected by the event in various ways.