자연언어에 나타나는 어와 구의 인터페이스에 관한 연구 -일한 양 언어의 명사 연결 형태를 중심으로-

Abstract

Human language is generated in a way that form a larger unit through interaction of phonemes, words, phrases. And each units have common properties in aspects of semantics and phenomenon of grammar. But is it really possible to draw a line accurately between each other units? In Japanese there exists so called “syntactic compound” which has not only lexical properties but also phrasal properties. This is a interfacial category which has never been mentioned in Japanese linguistics. This research aims to describe these interfacial category between word and phrase in Japanese and Korean and also try to prove the need of interfacial category by language phenomena. Focusing on compound nouns and noun phrases I try to suggest the linguistic evidences that there exist kinds of noun-phrase interfacial category. Generally, compound nouns are connected by two nouns and they belong to word category. Whereas noun phrases which nouns are connected by the connective particle belong to phrase category. But there also exist some boundary category between word and phrase. They represent lexical properties in one hand, and phrasal properties on the other hand. The typical property of word category is their strong combination. To identify their strong combination we analyzed data through three language phenomena which is (1)internal argument combination, (2)two argument combination constraints, (3)word type condition. Meanwhile, the property of phrase category is the thing that they have loose conditions when they connect more than two words, and they permit intervening elements between two nouns. These phrasal properties can be found out on following three points:(1)they can connected to external argument. (2)they can combine more than three arguments. (3)they have no word type condition. Interestingly, I could find out that there are some compound nouns which seem to belong to word category in form but don’t keep the rules of them. The properties of these elements of the word-phrase boundary category are as follows. First, modifiers can modify one part of the compound noun. Second, as they have no word type condition, they can combined with different word type. Third, they can combine more than three arguments at once. As we have seen above, these words are neither belong to typical word category nor phrase category. That is the interface of word and phrase.