On verbal compounds in Japanese

The lexical V-V complex is productive and well-documented in Japanese. This paper aims to capture the parametric variation of lexical V-V compounds in terms of the labeling theory proposed by Chomsky (2013, 2015). Focusing on the structure formed by two heads {H1, H2}, I argue that while lexical V-V compounds are not allowed in languages like English due to labeling failure, Japanese verbal property can avoid labeling conflict. Furthermore, some syntactic and morphological criteria of Japanese lexical V-V compounds are deduced from the labeling mechanism.