Abstract
To examine verb inflections in neologistic utterances in Japanese, verb generation tasks from pictures were administered to a fluent aphasic patient. The patient was required to generate three types of verb inflections of Teramura (1992), i. E., “KIHON-KEI” (non-past, dictionary form), “TE-KEI” (te-form : progressive form) and “MEIREI-KEI” (imperative form). Whereas approximately half of his utterances were neologistic, all of them were inferred as verbs since they were followed by appropriate inflections. In KIHON-KEI and MEIREI-KEI, phonemes at verb-stem final position were restricted to those of Japanese verbs, but this was not the case for TE-KEI. These results were, in large part, in accord with those of previous research on functional words in English neologisms as well as on past-tense generation of regular and irregular verbs, and demonstrated preserved verb inflections in Japanese neologisms. It may be concluded that preservation of verb inflections in neologisms reflects the difference in frequency between lexical and inflectional morphemes.
