Complex Predicates in Japanese (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics)

Being an agglutinative language, Japanese abounds in complex predicate constructions, which consist of a verb stem or gerund followed by another morpheme. Some such morphemes are bound forms and occur only adjacent to a verb stem, while others are free forms in the sense that they have a homophonous counterpart as a lexical verb. Complex predicates typically convey particular meanings concerning aspect, voice, modality, and so on, added to the lexical meaning of the stem/gerundive verb. The main purpose of this book is to give an analysis of complex predicate constructions in Japanese in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).