SEMANTIC AND GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES OF THE VERB CATEGORY IN JAPANESE

This article examines the semantic and grammatical properties of the Japanese verb category within a modern linguistic framework. It treats predication, argument structure, transitivity, tense, aspect, voice, modality, negation and honorific morphology as interrelated components of the verbal system. Particular attention is given to the polyfunctionality of -te iru, the semantic consequences of passive and causative constructions, and the interaction between verbal valency and case marking. The analysis shows that Japanese verbal meaning is distributed across lexical semantics, inflectional morphology and constructional context rather than being located in a single grammatical category.