A Construction-Based Approach to Phrasal Adjuncts in Japanese

Abstract

The adverbial phrases consisting of NP-o NP-ni in Japanese exhibit a set of properties that are not apparent from each of the elements comprising them. There is no source for the Accusative Case and the constituents cannot be scrambled internal to the phrase. Furthermore, the phrase has a general meaning that provides the circumstantial background for the event described by the main clause. This article presents a construction-based approach to the adverbial phrases which recognizes them as a grammatical construction to which a set of unpredictable syntactic and semantic properties should be attributed.