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Functional Projections of Nominals in Japanese: Syntax of Classifiers*

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Abstract

Japanese allows the numeral + classifier combination to appear in a variety of positions in relation to the head noun. This paper argues that it is necessary to posit at least four functional projections above NP (#P, CaseP, QP, and DP) and massive phrasal movement of such functional projections in order to provide a principled account for the structural diversity of the numeral + classifier combination in Japanese. New evidence from minimizer expressions and pseudopartitives, which have not been systematically investigated before, is brought to bear on details of the analysis. Japanese is an excellent testing ground for exploring the nature of the noun-related functional projections, because some of them, such as #° and Case°, are argued to be overtly realized (#° as a classifier and Case° as a case particle

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  1. Department of English, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan

    Akira Watanabe

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*Various parts of this paper were presented at a talk at Tohoku Gakuin University in December 2001, at Linguistics and Phonetics 2002 at Meikai University in September 2002, at the 20th Conference of the English Linguistic Society of Japan held at Aoyama Gakuin University in November 2002, at a talk at York University in December 2002, at WAFL 1 at MIT in May 2003, GLOW in Asia at Seoul National University in August 2003, at a talk at Kwansei Gakuin University in September 2003, and the 55th Meeting of the Chuubu branch of the English Literary Society of Japan at Kinjo Gakuin University in October 2003. I would like to thank the audiences there, including, but not limited to, Jun Abe, Kazuma Fujimaki, Naoki Fukui, Kazuhiko Fukushima, Kook-Hee Gill, Anders Holmberg, Yasuo Ishii, Masa Koizumi, Shigeru Miyagawa, David Pesetsky, Norvin Richards, Henk van Riemsdijk, Mamoru Saito, Daiko Takahashi, Yuji Takano, Satoshi Tomioka, George Tsoulas, Hiroyuki Ura, and Dong-Whee Yang. I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers, Jun Abe, Lisa Cheng, Marcel den Dikken, Yukio Furukawa, Hironobu Kasai, Yuki Kuroda, Takashi Munakata, Uli Sauerland, Hiroyuki Ura, and Kazuko Yatsushiro for comments and/or discussions at various stages.

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Watanabe, A. Functional Projections of Nominals in Japanese: Syntax of Classifiers*. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 24, 241–306 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-005-3042-4

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