The structure and meaning of Japanese light verbs

Matsumoto [Matsumoto, Y., 1996. Complex Predicates in Japanese, CSLI Publications and Kuroshio Publishers, Stanford and Tokyo] argues that Japanese light verbs, co-occurring with a VN, include control verbs such as hajimeru 'begin', kokoromiru 'attempt' as well as suru 'do' on the basis of the transfer of VN arguments and adjuncts. After critically examining his analysis in terms of syntax and semantics, this paper shows that a constructional distinction between light suru and control verbs is empirically necessary, and the differences are reduced to whether the Event Fusion takes place or not at the representational level of event structure. The proposed analysis allows us to account for the exact nature of behaviors of VN arguments and adjuncts and a number of details that are not addressed by previous studies [Matsumoto, Y., 1996. Complex Predicates in Japanese, CSLI Publications and Kuroshio Publishers, Stanford and Tokyo; Butt, M., 1995. The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu, CSLI Publications, Stanford]. A new formal account for the Japanese light verb construction is then provided under the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar [Bresnan, J., 1982, The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax, Blackwell, Oxford], which incorporates a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface.