A Computational Treatment of V-V Compounds in Japanese

We examine how a large-scale computational grammar can account for the complex nature of Japanese verbal compounds. Previous computational Japanese grammars have tried to avoid the problem by simple solutions such as enumerating as many verbal compounds in the lexicon as possible. In contrast, we develop the analysis that is linguistically adequate and computationally tractable and thus meets the requirement of a syntactically and semantically precise natural language processing of Japanese like Bond et al. (2005). Our analysis distinguishes between two kinds of verbal compounds: syntactic compounds, which are fully productive; and lexical compounds, which are of varying productivity.