Verb-Raising and Numeral Classifiers in Japanese: Incompatible Bedfellows

要旨

The status of verb-raising in Japanese (or in other languages where such an operation would be string vacuous) has been and still is quite controversial. Recently, Koizumi (2000) has put forward direct evidence for verb-raising drawing on data involving, among other things, numeral classifiers. Based on relevant and important facts that are overlooked by Koizumi and other researchers, this paper demonstrates that the alleged evidence based on the behavior of numeral classifiers does not support his claim that verb-raising occurs in Japanese. The apparently odd behavior of such classifiers (which can give rise to unusual looking constituents) noted by Koizumi will be given a semantic account. The present account is also capable of dealing with additional data with numeral classifiers that are problematic for him.