ABSTRACT
This chapter presents phonological motivations for the lexical derivation of complex predicates. It provides an overview of two approaches to the problem offered in the literature: the “Verb Raising” Approach and the “Lexical” Approach. The Lexical Approach to the complex predicates in Japanese is an extension of the Lexicalist Hypothesis, which confines all the derivational morphology to the lexicon. The chapter argues that quite regular dependencies exist between certain phonological rules and both derivational and inflectional suffixes in Japanese when they are involved in the derivation of simplex predicates and/or complex predicates. The idea that Japanese causatives involve syntactic complementation has been challenged by A. Farmer and S. Miyagawa, who independently proposed that “V-sase”, as well as other complex predicates, are derived in the lexicon by means of a morphological rule of affixation. The chapter briefly describes the major differences betwen Miyagawa’s and Farmer’s works.
