Transitive and unaccusative V-V constructions in Japanese Sign Language

Recent research has reported that in several sign languages, to denote a cause-effect semantic relation, serial verb constructions that are composed of transitive and unaccusative verbs (hereafter, V tra -V unacc ) are available (Lau 2012;Sevgi 2021;He and Tang 2023).This type of verb pairing may include both classifier (CL) and lexical verbs.Questions thus arise concerning whether any combinations of CL and lexical verbs are allowed in this type of V tra -V unacc construction in sign languages as well as what the semantic, morpho-syntactic, and phonological restrictions are (if any) that may be imposed on this type of verb complex.In this paper, on the basis of a grammaticality judgment survey conducted with four Deaf native signers, I show that all four possible CL/lexical combinations of V tra -V unacc in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) can be divided into three types with respect to their morpho-syntactic and phonological properties and interactions with telicity.The results reveal that only two of the three types are permitted in a serial verb construction.This observation is explained under a syntactic analysis that I propose, relying on a functional approach to complex predicates (Grose, Wilbur, and Schalber 2007;Ramchand 2008).