ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some aspects of verbal compounds in English and Japanese. It is concerned with relationship between argument structure of a verb and verbal compounds. The chapter looks at various frameworks that have been proposed to capture certain generalizations about this relationship and discusses the implication of those claims to our scheme of rule typology. It examines Japanese verbal compounds with the focus on how abstract nominals are used in such compounds to reflect the argument structure of the source verb, and aims to contrast them to the case of English verbal compounds. A major criticism to Roeper and Siegel’s analysis has been that they need to postulate a separate set of rules for deverbal nominals and adjectives besides the verbal compound formation rule, although they involve exactly the same set of affixes. The chapter discusses some obervations on the phonological process ‘rendaku’ that frequently takes place in the compounds of Japanese.
