The thesis shows that the systematic study of lexical semantics contributes to the construction of lexical structures and interpretive mapping rules. Lexical semantics provides insight into systematic correspondences between syntax and semantics. We focus on Japanese verbs and classify them based on their common syntactic behavior, giving special attention to case alternations. Then we utilize knowledge representation techniques and inheritance mechanisms developed by artificial intelligence researchers to organize predicate frames hierarchically for interpretive mapping. The hierarchical organization of predicate frames can be incorporated into a system that does natural language processing, such as parsing a sentence into some meaning representation or generating a sentence from a meaning representation. 
