Handbook of Japanese Lexicon and Word Formation (Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics [HJLL], 3)

This volume presents a comprehensive survey of the lexicon and word formation processes in contemporary Japanese, with particular emphasis on their typologically characteristic features and their interactions with syntax and semantics. Through contacts with a variety of languages over more than two thousand years of history, Japanese has developed a complex vocabulary system that is composed of four lexical strata: (i) native Japanese, (ii) mimetic, (iii) Sino-Japanese, and (iv) foreign (especially English). This hybrid composition of the lexicon, coupled with the agglutinative character of the language by which morphology is closely associated with syntax, gives rise to theoretically intriguing interactions with word formation processes that are not easily found with inflectional, isolate, or polysynthetic types of languages. Table of contents Preface Introduction to the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics Contributors Introduction I. Lexicon and vocabulary items 1. Vocabulary strata and word formation processes 2. Lexical categories 3. Sino-Japanese words 4. Mimetics 5. The morphology of English loanwords II. Morphology and word formation 6. Word structure and headedness 7. Noun-compounding and noun-incorporation 8. Verb-compounding and verb-incorporation 9. Conversion and deverbal compound nouns 10. Derivational affixation in the lexicon and syntax 11. Complex predicates with -te gerundive verbs 12. Light verb constructions with verbal nouns 13. Inflection 14. Lexical integrity and the morphology-syntax interface III. Word classes and syntactic behavior 15. Lexical meaning and temporal aspect 16. Stative and existential/possessive verbs 17. Agent nominals 18. Complement-taking nouns 19. Idioms Subject index