Abstract
English loanwords transformed into Japanese have lexical categorization processes applied to them. This paper hypothesizes that the concept of part of speech in English influences the concept of part of speech in Japanese in the lexical categorization process. This study examines the Japanese lexical categorization of English loanwords which are suffixed with“ -suru (to do)” (the X-suru construction) in Japanese. 402 English loanwords which allow the X-suru construction in Japanese were extracted from the Concise Katakana Word Dictionary, 2nd edition (Sanseido, 2004), the English parts of speech were looked up in the Progressive English-Japanese Dictionary, 4th edition (Shogakukan, 2006) and classified into 5 categories in terms of English parts of speech:“ Verb,”“ Noun,” “Gerund,”“ Noun/Verb,” and“ Verb/Noun.” In each category, 10 words were selected randomly and observed in terms of syntactic behaviors in the Japanese“ X-suru construction,”“ Adjective + X construction” and“ X-o-suru construction.” The Japanese lexical category for“ X” was identified in these constructions. The results confirm the hypothesis that the lexical categorization of katakana words borrowed from English (X) in the Adjective + X construction, X-o-suru and X-suru construction is influenced by the nominal or verbal features of English, and that such words are categorized as a Japanese gerund with both nominal and verbal syntactic features.
