Constructions in RRG

This paper examines the ability of a mimetic verb in Japanese (e.g. burabura ‘manner of swinging’ + suru ‘do’ → burabura-suru) to occur in different morphosyntactic environments. Following Van Valin (2013), it argues that two seemingly contradictory standpoints, a constructionist’s view (Tsujimura 2005) and a projectionist’s view (Kageyama 2007), are actually complementary. While an account of intransitive mimetic verbs requires no postulation of constructional schemas, as these verbs show straightforward cases of linking in simple sentences, the paper utilizes two constructional schemas to cover notable characteristics of transitive mimetic verbs: one for mimetics compounded by -sase ‘cause’ and the other for the colloquial alternate of the adverbial mimetic-transitive verb combination.