Corpus Analysis Of The Collocations Of The Transitive Verbs Owaru And Oeru

Abstract

The transitivity of Japanese verbs is a topic, which had been widely discussed in Japan even before the beginning of the Meiji period and is still one of the major obstacles for learners of Japanese nowadays. This paper focuses on the transitivity of the verbs owaru(to end [tr./intr.]) and oeru(to end [tr.]). It encompasses the analysis of collocations of the two verbs and examines their objects in the patterns ‘N wo owaru’ and ‘N wo oeru’. The aim of this research is to give a new perspective on the usage of the two verbs. The analysis of both collocations and co-occurring verbal forms shows collocations grouping into individual semantic categories. Furthermore, verbs exhibit specific morphological characteristics in different semantic fields of the collocations.