A Contrastive Study of the Locative Alternations in Japanese and English: A Hierarchical Model of Semantic Types of Verbs

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The locative alternation is a phenomenon in which a certain class of verbs causes an alternation in syntactic frames. This study discussed the mechanism of the Japanese and English locative alternations.The locative alternation in both languages arises as a result of a semantic type shift, in which the same objective event is linguistically conceptualized either as a subtype of a change of location or a subtype of a change of state, and can be accounted for by assuming three hierarchically ordered levels in semantic types of verbs: a level determining the syntactic frame of a verb, a lower level determining whether a verb undergoes alternation, and a much lower level determining the allowable pattern of the alternation. Although the Japanese and English locative alternations arise by the same mechanism, the lists of alternating verbs slightly differ between the two languages. This difference can be accounted for by the semantic characteristics of each verb.