Various types of 'do' sentences in Japanese are analyzed by means of nominal classi cation into entities, events, and attributes.Entities are used in 'do' sentences of wearing, events are used in the so-called light verb constructions, and attributes are used in the so-called blue-eye constructions.Nouns undergo semantic shift between the three types, and this is characterized as pragmatic conventionalization.Conventionalization yields 'constructions,' but our analyses also feature semantic compositionality.Constructions and compositionality work complementarily.The proposed analyses provide a proper division of labor between grammar and pragmatics in 'do' sentences, which has been obscure in previous studies.5, pp.57-94.
Nishiyama et al. (Sun,) studied this question.