Predicting Attachment of the Light Verb –suru to Japanese Two-kanji Compound Words Using Four Aspects

Tamaoka Katsuo

Matsuoka Chizuko

Sakai Hiromu

Makioka Shogo

Glottometrics

In the Japanese language, the light verb –suru can be attached to various two-kanji compound words containing a verb-like feature (or aspects) to allow them to be used as a verb. Using a large sample of the 2,000 two-kanji compound words, encompassing a little less than 80 percent of the total two-kanji compound words printed in 14 years of Asahi Newspaper issues, the present study investigates how much the light verb attachment is predicted by four aspects: inchoative, durative, telic and stative. A binary logistic regression analysis indicates that all four aspects are significant predictors. Among them, the telic aspect shows an overwhelmingly high predictive power. The quantitative theory type III analysis further demonstrates that, in contrast to the stative aspect, the inchoative, durative and telic aspects share a similar semantic feature of time series. Nevertheless, since the telic aspect overlaps not only the time series feature of the inchoative and durative aspects, but also the stative aspect, it is the most effective single predictor for light verb attachment, showing an extremely high prediction percentage of 93.64 with 1.05 percent error.

light verb -suru

aspect

verb-likeness

two kanji-compound words

binary logistic regression analysis

Hayashi's Quantitative Theory Type III

Japanese [ 810 ]

eng