Verb meanings and their effects on syntactic behaviors: A study with special reference to English and Japanese ergative pairs

Ergative alternation is a process of valency shift observed cross-linguistically in which verbs alternate in transitivity with little or no change in form. Verbs that participate in the ergative alternation in English have been investigated from syntactic and semantic perspective. Japanese ergative pairs, on the other hand, are characterized not only by valency shift but also by their derivational oppositions between transitive and intransitive alternants. Given such characteristics, previous research has mainly focused on describing the derivational patterns and classifying ergative pairs accordingly. This in turn results in insufficient attention to semantic aspects of Japanese ergative pairs.; The major research goal of this dissertation is to investigate whether verbal meanings determine the alternating behaviors of ergative verbs. Under the framework of lexical semantics, this dissertation presents a semantic analysis of ergative pairs in Japanese. I propose to utilize research findings reported in works on English ergative pairs to explicate the cause of the alternating behaviors of Japanese ergative pairs. One crucial finding is that semantic properties of verbs such as change of state and specification of causation are key factors both in English and Japanese in differentiating verbs that undergo the alternation from those which do not. Nevertheless, my research shows that there is some significant disagreement between English and Japanese in terms of the ergative alternatability of verbs. I suggest that such discrepancy results in part from lexical idiosyncrasies in each language. More importantly, however, I propose that different alternating behaviors may reflect the way native English and Japanese speakers perceive certain events differently. The implication of this observation will be that other different syntactic behaviors between English and Japanese may reflect people's different perception of events.