Parts of speech membership as a factor of meaning extension and level of abstraction: Comparison of Czech adjectives and Japanese verbs in adnominal modification

Abstract Czech and Japanese show formal differences in adnominal modification. Czech tends to utilize adjectives for both classification and qualification purposes whereas Japanese tends to express classification by compounding and to use a whole range of parts of speech for qualification. As a result, part of speech membership often differs between the Czech and Japanese rendering of the same referential content. It has been shown that parts of speech dispose of schematic meaning which contributes to conceptualization. Based on the results of corpora analysis, I argue that the difference in parts of speech membership results in different tendencies in meaning extension and ultimately in different meaning of the two counterparts, Czech adjectives are more abstract and schematic while Japanese verbs are more concrete.