| The debate in the previous literature on compound verbs has focused on whether Japanese aspectual compound verbs have a complex underlying structure irrespective of their morphological status. As consequence the morphology of the lexical items in these aspectual compound verbs has never been treated seriously. The formal approaches seek the generalization of linguistic phenomenon, but such approaches do not seem to treat individual lexical items seriously, and neglect to explain the motivation for the exclusive transitivity of aspectual inception compound verbs. The formal approaches avoid dealing with the polysemous meanings of each lexical item and with individual grammaticalized morphemes, and they have attempted to collapse diverse meanings of a given affix into a single set of semantic features.; This dissertation provides an explanatory account of the dynamic interaction between the verbal affixes and the lexical content of both non-derived aspectual verbs and derived aspectual verbs, and presents the semantic meanings of the transitive alternation verbal affixes. The framework of a cognitive semantic approach was adopted in this thesis, and provides a unified explanatory account for the formation of these aspectual compound verbs. This is a “bottom-up” approach that views the grammar of a language as a “structured inventory of conventional linguistic units” moving from the morphemes - e-, -ar-, and -as- to further complex expressions such as compound verbs, and that also introduces a conceptualist view of meaning in which “construal” plays an especially crucial role. This framework also provides a method of theoretical analysis to deal with the grammaticalization of aspectual compound verbs in terms of the morphemes -e-, -ar-, and -as-, and to explicate the gradient distinctions in construal, i.e., the gradual semantic shift in the grammaticalization path with respect to “subjectification”.; This study argues that the morphosyntactic structure reflects semantic properties, and displays the evidence for the grammaticalization path by revealing the shift in the profiled part of the internal structure of the aspectual compound verbs with respect to the affixes. |
