Corpus–Based Research into Derivational Morphology: A Comparative Study of Japanese and English Verbalization

As part of elucidating the syntax-morphology interaction, this study investigates where and how complex verbs are formed in Japanese and English. Focusing on the Japanese verbforming suffix -ka-suru (e.g. toshi-o gendaika-suru ‘modernize city’), relevant verbs are extracted from a large-scale corpus and they receive an in-depth analysis from semantic, morphosyntactic, and functional viewpoints. The properties of -ka-suru and those of its English counterpart are then compared and contrasted. The result reveals three main points: (i) -ka-suru verbs are constantly created in syntactic settings to fulfill the functions of brevity and conceptualization, (ii) while denominal -ize derivatives have several submeanings such as ‘result,’ ‘ornative,’ and ‘agentive,’ -ka-suru equivalents retain the meaning ‘result,’ and (iii) -ka-suru can be combined with compound nouns, but -ize cannot. We will demonstrate that the above features originate in the underlying syntactic structure related to each suffix and their difference, thus supporting the thesis of syntactic word formation.