A corpus-based study on the syntactic compound verb -kiru in Japanese : How the prepositional verb affects the semantic meaning in the verb-kiru construc

Sammanfattning

This corpus-based study investigates the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs collocated with the Japanese syntactic compound verb -kiru and aims to establish how the prepositional verb affects the semantic meaning of the verb-kiru construct. The study uses sketchengine’s online database, “Japanese Web2011”, which contains around 8 billion Japanese terms collected from the internet from various online sources from 2011 and onwards. From my results I was able to establish the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs in a -kiru construct from the database, and through a concordance analysis I was able to identify three semantic meanings incurred by the syntactic compound verb -kiru: the semantic meaning of completion, the dual semantic meaning of completion and extremity and the semantic meaning of extremity. Further analysis showed that the semantic meaning of extremity exists in the deep structure of the sentence and when transformed to the surface structure the semantic meaning shifts to that of completion.