Categorical Meaning of a Word as a Linkage between Lexicon and Grammar(2)
―The Nature of Categorical Meaning and its Relation to Teaching Japanese―

HAYATSU Emiko

This paper is a continuation of the author’s most recent paper (Hayatsu 2015), and these two parts constitute one article. This article aims to explain the importance of ‘categorical meaning’ as a linkage between vocabulary and grammar. A word has its own lexical meaning, namely referential meaning, as well as its own grammatical (both morphological and syntactical) characteristics. Here, morphological characteristic means whether or not a word can change its form grammatically, and if it can, what kind of changes would take place; syntactical characteristic means how a word is combined with other words when they are composed into a sentence.

When a word is used as an element of a sentence, it does not only express its lexical meaning but it also expresses its grammatical meaning, namely its ‘semantic role’ in that sentence at the same time. This correlation between lexical and grammatical features is thought to come from a ‘categorical meaning’ of each word. The categorical meaning of a word could be thought as an aspect which is included in its lexical meaning and brings about its grammatical characteristics in a sentence. The words showing the same grammatical characteristics have the same categorical meaning in common.

In the previous paper (Hayatsu 2015), I demonstrated many kinds of categorical meanings in Japanese. And in this paper, I showed how and to what degree these categorical meanings work in the sentence, and discussed its importance and effectiveness in the teaching of Japanese as a second language.