A Contrastive Study of Function Verbs in English and Japanese : Cut and Kiru

This paper gives a contrastive analysis of function verbs in English and Japanese, cut and kiru in the framework of the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995). Despite their division sense, these two express performance of an event when they take constituents which denote eventuality. They differ, however, in the resulting event structures. On the one hand, ‘cut+an event nominal’ can be dealt with as involving a generative operation called co-composition, and describes a temporally bounded event. On the other hand, V-kiru denotes an accomplishment event by means of another operation, type coercion. This analysis also accounts for the difference in selection restriction between the two forms.