Case-relations and verb

Abstract

The semantic structure of a verb is determined by the number and the type of case-relations in its case-frame. Three experiments examined the effect these two factors had on the retrievalspeed of case-relations in some Japanese verb-noun pairs. In Exp. 1, 56 undergraduate and graduate students responded more rapidly to the verbs with less number of case-relations, but detailed analysis suggested that the type rather than the number of case-relations could explain the variance of data more adequately. In Exps. 2 and 3, 64 undergraduate and graduate students responded more rapidly to the verb-noun pairs of Objective case-relation than to those of Agentive or Instrumental case-relations; this confirmed the importance of the type of case-relations, especially of Objective case-relation in the semantic structure of verbs. As Agentive and Instrumental case-relations presuppose the participation of an animate agent in the action whereas Objective does not, the dominance of the Objective case-relation may imply that the understanding of a causal relation involving an animate agent is secondary to the process of the understanding of descriptive phenomena.