Compositional Mechanisms of Japanese Numeral Classifiers

要旨

This paper suggests that Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky, 1995(Pustejovsky, , 2006(Pustejovsky, , 2011) ) offers a new analysis of numeral classifiers, focusing on Japanese having various kinds of classifiers.It is often said that classifiers agree with quantified nouns, that is, the nouns have to match the semantic requirements of the classifiers.This paper examines their lexical structures and compositional mechanisms.Though Huang and Ahrens (2003) explain the compositional mechanisms between the classifiers and the quantified nouns using "coercion" instead of the agreement, this paper indicates that other mechanisms including Type Matching (Pustejovsky, 2011) also occur in Japanese depending on the type required by the classifier and the source type of the quantified noun, following Mano and Yonezawa's (to appear) suggestion.

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