Japanese has two types of two-place motion verbs whose ‘objects’ can be marked as either accusative or oblique (accusative–oblique alternations). The accusative–goal verbs mark their objects with accusative case -o or the goal marker -ni, and the accusative–source verbs mark their objects with accusative -o or the source marker -kara. Previous studies describe systematic differences in the interpretation of the arguments of these verbs and the events they denote between the two structures. This study argues that these alternating verbs are variable behavior verbs that are linked to two distinct syntactic structures. The core evidence for this claim comes from the results of two acceptability judgment experiments with Japanese native speakers that examined: (i) selectional restrictions on the subjects of the alternating verbs and (ii) the ability of their subjects to license ‘floating’ numeral quantifiers. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the accusative–source verbs alternate between the transitive and unaccusative structures, whereas the accusative–goal verbs consistently behave like transitive verbs but assign two different structural cases to their objects. Thus, the study shows that there are multiple ways in which two-place motion verbs are mapped onto distinctive syntactic structures, whereby the core meaning of the verbs and their syntactic structures together determine their interpretation.

中文翻译：

---

变行为动词的句法：来自日语宾格-斜格交替的实验证据

日语有两种类型的二位运动动词，其“宾语”可以标记为宾格或斜格（宾格-倾斜交替）。这宾格动词用宾格标记他们的对象 -○或目标标记 -你, 和宾格源动词用宾格标记他们的对象-o或源标记 -卡拉. 以前的研究描述了对这些动词的论点的解释以及它们在两种结构之间表示的事件的系统差异。本研究认为，这些交替动词是与两种不同的句法结构相关的可变行为动词。这一主张的核心证据来自对日本母语人士进行的两次可接受性判断实验的结果，这些实验检查了：（i）对交替动词主语的选择限制和（ii）他们的主语许可“浮动”数字量词的能力. 实验结果表明，宾格-源动词在及物和非宾格结构之间交替出现，而宾格-目标动词始终表现得像及物动词，但将两种不同的结构格分配给它们的宾语。