Towards a proper treatment of adjuncts in Japanese

In this paper we will discuss interpretation of adverbs in Japanese. We will explore the division of labor between the syntactic requirements, semantic requirements, and discourse-contextual constraints involving adverbial interpretation. It will then be argued that this inter-modular approach utilizing LFG explains various elusive paradigms of the adverbs. 1. Scope Ambiguity and Lexical Semantics We will start with lexical semantic considerations of adverb scope. Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) argue that different types of adjuncts modify different types of subevents in the event structure of a verb. Under recent assumptions in LFG, lexical semantic information is encoded in f(unctional) structure (Butt 1995, Andrews and Manning 1999, Wilson 1999). There have been a number of proposals concerning the level of lexical semantic representation that can capture the various properties of a verb, including argument projection, aspectual class, transitivity alternation, and so on (Jackendoff 1990, Levin and RappaportHovav 1995, Kageyama 1996, among many others). We conjecture that event structure representations factor out the part of the verb semantics that contribute to the aspectual property of the verb, while leaving the other components of the meaning to be specified by the LCS that accompanies each subevent as shown in (1), in which x and y represent external argument and internal argument, respectively. “*” indicates the head subevent, and “<” means ‘precedes’ and the structure in the parentheses shows that the corresponding LCS for the subevent. (1) a. state (e.g. aru ‘exist’): State (at-STATE (y)) b. act (e.g. tataku ‘pound’): Process (act (x, y)) c. achievement (e.g. sinu ‘die’): Transition Process State* (P<S) (act (x, y)) (at-STATE (y)) d. accomplishment (e.g. tsukuru ‘build’): Transition Process* State (P<S) (act (x, y)) (at-STATE (y)) PACLIC 18, December 8th-10th, 2004, Waseda University, Tokyo