出版物 ｜Sophia Linguistica
Yukino Kobayashi
A peculiar and poorly understood property of the so-called Japanese light verb construction (LVC) is that arguments of a verbal noun can drop a Gen case marker –no. The aims of this paper are (i) to claim that Gen-dropped arguments of a verbal noun are in fact non-arguments of that verbal noun and (ii) to show that properties of LVCs that seem construction-specific can be accounted for on the basis of general properties of Japanese. Building on observations of argument structures of noun phrases, this paper claims that the Gen-dropped elements in question are base-generated at the embedded nP edge or the matrix VP edge, both of which are interpreted in terms of their aboutness relations with verbal noun predicates at the C-I interface. The paper further demonstrates that the proposed analysis adequately accounts for the properties of LVCs that have not been adequately explained by previous theta-driven movement or argument raising approaches.
