Abstract:

The present study investigates the encoding of motion in Japanese motion verbs. Kita (1999) claimed that two Japanese motion verbs hairu ‘enter’ and deru ‘exit’ do not encode motion in transition but only encode change of state. Thus, hairu would not mean ‘enter’ but rather means ‘become inside’. Tsujimura (2002) replied to Kita (1999) by stating that his arguments do not hold and that these motion verbs pattern like other motion verbs, i.e. they encode transition. However, Tsujimura (2002) proposes another analysis of Japanese motion verbs whereby verbs that occur in transitive-intransitive pairs have properties of verbs of putting alongside their directed motion semantics, i.e. they can be interpreted in two ways. Other motion verbs that do not have a transitive counterpart do not display this putting verb semantics. This study aims at disentangling these two accounts by means of an acceptability judgment task in which participants judge sentences as descriptions of video clips. A comparison is made between directed motion verbs that do have a transitive counterpart and those that do not. In addition, a cross-linguistic comparison is made between Dutch and Japanese to investigate whether there is a substantial difference between the semantics of motion verbs in these languages. The findings suggest that Japanese motion verbs behave as Dutch motion verbs and do encode motion in transition.

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