広島大学総合科学部紀要. V, 言語文化研究 Volume 24
published_at 1998-12-25

状態及び状態変化動詞の意味論

The Semantics of State and Change of State Verbs
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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is twofold. One is to give the basic function-argument organization for the semantic representation of the state and change of state verbs. The other is to propose a lexical rule called "HAVE-Production Rule," which derives the function HAVE from the primitive BE and to discuss how LCS (Lexical Conceptual Structures) with HAVE correspond to syntactic structures.

For the first purpose it is argued that since the Path-function occurs as the second argument of either BE- or GO-function, the GO-function can be reduced to INCH-BE. It is also pointed out that the other STATE and EVENT functions, ORIENT, EXT and STAY, which Jackendoff (1990) posits as primitives, can be dispensed with; the first one is analyzed as a variant of BE-Path and the second one as a variant of the GO-function under the condition that the moving entity is itself a Path; and the third one is decomposed into 'NOT-INCH-BE-NOT-AT.' Thus it is concluded that there are no more than two primitive functions for the verbs in question, that is, BE and INCH.

For the second purpose it is argued that the function HAVE is by no means primitive and that there must be a lexical rule which converts the positional BE with a Place argument into the possessional HAVE. Arguments are also given for the intermediate stages in the operation of the rule, and for the mapping of the output LCS to its argument structure and D-structure.