Information Spreading and Light verb Constructions in Japanese

This paper presents an analysis of Japanese light verb construdions within the framework of LFG. Several pieces of evidence support the assumption that a verbal Noun and a light verb form a single complex predicate. However, this assumption requires the VN's grammatical information to be a part of a martrix predicate, and it also makes the case feature of the accusative marker appear at the matrix level.

A possible way out of this problem lies in using the notion of information spreading proposed in Andrews and Manning (1999). This approach allows different types of information to be spread separately. If we suppose that the light verb construction has an embedded structure in terms of argument structure and morphosyntactic information while having single predicate status with grammatical relations, then we have the desired result.