Nayuki Ono and Sachi Takahashi
Graduate School of International Cultural Studies
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

An Event Structure Analysis of Japanese Passives　(Naoyuki Ono)

In this presentation, I would like to show that one type of Japanese passives exhibits the event structure and qualia structure which follow from the causative lexical conceptual paradigm proposed within the model of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995). Focusing on two types of passives in Japanese, I will suggest that a mapping condition between event structure and syntax explains the syntactic realization of arguments and that an elaboration of the agentive qualia role is needed to account for the selection of verbs in the passive.

Sense Generation in Japanese Word Formation (Sachi Takahashi)

Type Structure represents the type of word and Qualia Structure specifies its definitional properties. Their introduction has enabled us to express default arguments related with a nominal and to account for various polysemous features of language. This talk presents our attempt to apply Generative-Lexicon (GL) framework to Japanese complex words such as derivates and compounds. In the process of compositon, their multi-senses are generated by lexical operations in Type structure and Qualia Structure. This talk also provides some recent approaches to adopt rich representation of GL for building lexical database.