A verbal noun (VN) in Japanese is a predicative nominal, which can form a verbal expression with a light verb suru 'do'. It is argued in the previous literature that a VN exhibits mixed characteristics of a verb and a noun (cf. Sells 1990, Kageyama 1993, Manning 1993, etc.), but it has not been clearly discussed in what respect a VN resembles a noun, and in what sense it behaves like a verb. This paper deals with basic characteristics of VNs, focusing on examining the categorial status of a VN from both morphological and syntactic perspectives. It will be argued that a VN has a form of a noun, and syntactic properties of a verb.
The structure of this paper is as follows: section 2 summarizes typical properties of a noun and a verb as a basis for describing characteristics of VNs; section 3 looks at data of VNs, examining their nominal and verbal characteristics; section 4 reviews some previous approaches to VN constructions; then section 5 proposes an analysis of the VN constructions by encoding relevant information in the lexical entry of a VN.