영어의 동사성 복합어 연구

Abstract

English compounds are distinguished into two kinds, root compounds and synthetic verbal ones. The second one refers to a compound whose head is derived by affixation from a verb. This verbal head generally takes the form of a stem plus an affix such as -eπ -ed, -ing, and the non-head is interpreted as an argument of the head or a closely related adjunct (ex: truck driver, moth-eaten, fast-acting). In this paper, 1 attempt to figure out which element can be the non-heads of verbal compounds in terms of argument structure theory. My starting point is Grimshaw (1990), which assumes two independent notions of thematic roles and causer/non-causer in order to account for them. First, 1 show her account fails to provide a correct prediction for various cases especially where the head is derived from unaccusatives, psychological causatives, on passives. Rather, 1 provide an account based on two aspectual notions: a determinant and an affected entity. The former is intended to inc1ude a causer, the subject of psychological statives and that of unaccusatives, while the latter picks out the entity marking the aspectual endpoint of an event. 1 argue that the hierarchical order based an these two notions determines the acceptability of the non-heads of these compounds.