ON INCORPORATION OF PREDICATIVE EXPRESSIONS IN VERBAL COMPOUNDS

Abstract

Following the basic idea of Selkirk 1982 and Lieber 1983 to deal with verbal compounds in terms of the argument structures of verbal heads, we examine verbal compounds incorporating predicative expressions. We propose a framework for analyzing the internal structures of verbal compounds, which is different in detail from either Selkirk or Lieber. Noting that adjectives and nouns do not take predicative expressions as their arguments though they can occur with predicative expressions that are non-argument adjuncts, we show that seemingly complicated data distribution is correctly predicted in the proposed framework.