Iwasaki Hiroyuki

Suzuki Satoshi

Tsukuba Repository  (Tulips-R)

A Contrastive Study of Noun Phrases inJapanese and English (<Summaries of the PapersRead at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of theTsukuba English Linguistic Society>)著者 Suzuki Satoshi, Iwasaki Hiroyukijournal orpublication titleTsukuba English Studiesvolume 29page range 267-270year 2011-02-03URL http://hdl.handle.net/2241/118777A Contrastive Study of Noun Phrases in Japanese and English Satoshi Suzuki and Hiroyuki Iwasaki 267 In his seminal work, Chierchia (1998) categorizes natural languages by the characteristics ofNP, that is, whether NP needs a determiner to become an argument. According to Chierchia, languages are divided into three types, viz. NP[ +argument, -predicate], NP[ -argument, +predicate], and NP[ +argument, +predicate 1. Chierchia argues that Japanese is an instance of NP[ +arg, -pred] languages, and that all NPs are mass in Japanese. In fact, it has been argued in the I iterature that Japanese NPs exhibit the same behavior as English mass NPs. Observe the following examples: (1) a. b. (2) a. soto-ni benchi-ga mittsu arimasu outside-at bench-NOM 3-CL exist-PRES 'There are three benches outside.' sono benchi-wa sobo-kara-no okurimono desu that bench-TOP grandmother- from-GEN gift COP 'The benches are the gift from my grandmother.' (Nemoto (2005:387)) soto-ni katachi-ga chigau benchi-ga mittsu arimasu outside-at shape-NOM different bench-NOM 3-CL exist-PRES 'There exist three benches with different shapes.' b. * sono benchi-wa sobo-kara-no okurimono desu that bench-TOP grandmother-from-GEN gift 'The benches are the gift from my grandmother.' COP (=(1b)) c. sore-ra-no benchi-wa sobo-kara-no okurimono desu (3) a. b. (4) a. that-PL-GEN bench-TOP grandmother-from-GEN gift COP 'The benches are the gift from my grandmother.' (Nel11oto (2005:388)) daremo-ga hon-o yonda everyone-NOM book-ACC read 'Everyone read books.' darelllo-ga gaikokujin-o mikaketa everyone-NOM foreigner-ACC saw 'Everyone saw foreigners.' Hanako-wa Hanako-TOP hon-o book-ACC 'Hanako bought no book.' (Nemoto (2005:389)) kawa-naka-tta buy-NEG-PAST Tsukuba English Studies (2011) vo1.29, 267-270 268 b. Taroo-wa Taro-TOP gaikokujin-o foreigner-ACC 'Taro saw no foreigner.' mikake-naka-tta see-NEG- PAST (Nemoto (2005:390)) Sentence (1 a) conveys the information that there is more than one bench outside, but in sentence (1 b), the singular form 'sono benchi' is used to refer to the benches in question. On the other hand, sentence (2a) says that the benches outside are different from each other in shape. In this case, as shown in (2b, c), they must be referred to not by the singular fo'rm 'sono benchi' but by the plural form 'sore-ra-no benchi.' In the sentences of (3) and (4), the quantifier 'daremo' and the negation have wide scope over the objects, but not vice versa, respectively. The behavior of Japanese NPs presented above is quite parallel to that of mass NPs in English, and thus constitutes corroborating evidence for Chierchia's claim. The mass-like behavior of Japanese NPs is also illustrated by the following example: (5) Bill-wa ip-pun-kan pan / ringo-o Bill-TOP one-minute-for bread / apple-ACC 'Bill ate bread / apple for one minute.' tabe-ta. eat-PAST (Yoshida (2008:422)) The presence of the adverbial IJ)-pun-kan 'for one minute' in sentence (5) proves clearly that it is interpreted as atelic. This indicates that the amount of bread or apples has no upper limit. The NPs in question are similar to mass NPs in that both NPs do not identify the exact amount of their referents. This example hence provides a piece of evidence for the masshood of Japanese NPs. It is, however, unnecessary to consider the sentences in (1-5) indicative of the mass-like characteristics of Japanese NPs. Consider the following sentences: (6) a. soto-ni benchi-ga mittsu arimasu outside-at bench-NOM 3-CL exist-PRES 'There are three benches outside.' (=(1a)) b. sore-ra-no benchi-\va sobo-kara-no okurimono desu that-PL-GEN bench-TOP grandmother-from-GEN gift COP 'The benches are the gift from my grandmother.' (= (2c)) 269 (7) a. There are three pieces of furniture outside. b. * These furnitures are gifts from my grandmother. (Nemoto (2005:396)) (8) a. daremo-ga san-satsu-no hon-o yon-da everyone-NOM 3-CL~GEN book-ACC read-PAST 'Everyone read three books.' b. daremo-ga hon-o san-satsu everyone-NOM book-ACC 3-CL 'Everyone read three books.' (9) a. Hanako-wa is-satsu-no hon-o Hanako-TOP l-CL-GEN book-ACC 'Hanako didn't buy a book.' b. Hanako-wa hon-o is-satsu Hanako-TOP book-ACC l-CL 'Hanako bought no book.' (l0) Bill-wa ip-pun-de pan / ringo-o yon-da read-PAST (cf. Nemoto (2005 :409)) kawa-naka-tta buy-NEG-PAST kawa-naka-tta buy-NEG-PAST Bill-TOP one-minute-in bread / apple-ACC tabe-ta. eat-PAST 'Bill ate bread / apple in one minute.' (Yoshida (2008:422)) Instead of 'sono benchi' in (lb), the plural form 'sore-ra-no benchi' is used with the same function as the former in the acceptable sentence in (6b). Notice that if Chierchia's claim, according to which Japanese NPs are all mass, is on the right track, sentence (6b) should not be allowed. In fact, sentence (7b), in which the NP furniture is pluralized, is unacceptable, whereas the phrase three pieces of furniture in (7a) is perfectly legitimate. In sentence (8a), the NP san-satsu-no hon, which is regarded as countable via a classifier expression, takes scope over the quantifier 'daremo' and vice versa. More interestingly, in sentence (8b), the quantifier has wide scope over the NP hon-o san-satsu, which is the same as the NP san-satsu-no hon in (8a) in the relevant respect, but the opposite scope relation is impossible. It is therefore reasonable to argue that the scope issue does not support Chierchia's claim. This conclusion is strengthened by the scope interpretation observed in (9). While in sentence (9a), the count NP is-sa/su-no hon has wide scope over the negation and vice versa, sentence (9b) only allows the interpretation in which the negation has wide scope over the count NP hon-o is-satsu. The scope of the latter is shared with the sentences in (4), and thus leads us to the above conclusion. In sentence (l0), which is minimally different from that of (5), the adverbial ip-pun-de 270 'in one minute' is used. . The adverbial shows that the event denoted by the sentence is telic and implies that the amount of bread or apples is certainly finite. This property of the referents is incompatible with the so-called unbounded extension of a mass NP. It is worth remarking that Yoshida (2008) observes that sentence (5) is less natural than sentence (10). To the extent that her observation is correct, it follows that the fortner does not yield any evidence for Chierchia's claim, and, more importantly, that the latter encourages the view that Japanese has the mass/count distinction as English does. Watanabe (2006) adduces further evidence for the existence of the mass/count distinction in Japanese and states that '~J apanese is not a NP[ +arg, -pred] language" in Chierchia's sense (p. 279). Naturally, our conclusion conforms to his statement. The rejection of Chierchia's characterization, however, poses the question of how to account for the fact that Japanese, unlike English, allows the bare argument. As a solution, the present paper proposes that Japanese bare arguments are semantically licensed by a type-shifting operation. According to Chierchia's (1998) Blocking Principle, a type-shifting operation is dependent on whether a functional category D exists in a language or not. It is argued in Fukui (1986) that while Japanese lacks functional categories, English does not. If his assumption is true, it follows that a type-shifting operation is applicable in Japanese and its bare arguments semantically correspond to either a definite or an indefinite NP. In contrast, in English, due to the inapplicability of type-shifting, no NP([ +pred]) occurs in the argument position without the aid of the determiner. Thus, the proposed account successfully captures the difference between the two languages. In sum, we argue (i) that the mass/count distinction is detectable in Japanese as well as in English and (ii) that the application of a type-shifting operation enables Japanese bare NPs to occur in the argument position. A typological implication of our analysis is that Japanese belongs to NP[ +arg, +pred] languages with no article in Chierchia's typology. This implies that Japanese forms the same natural class with Slavic languages. SELECTED REFERENCES Chierchia, Gennaro (1998) "Reference to Kinds across Languages," Nalural Language Semal1lies 6, 339-405. Nemoto, Naoko (2005) "On Mass Denotations of Bare Nouns in Japanese and Korean," Linguistics 43,383-413. Yoshida, Keiko (2008) "Bare Nouns and Telicity ill Japanese," Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches' 10 the Seman lies of AspeCI, ed. by Susan Rothstein, 421-439, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. 

A Contrastive Study of Noun Phrases in Japanese and English (<Summaries of the Papers Read at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Tsukuba English Linguistic Society>)

A Contrastive Study of Noun Phrases in Japanese and English (<Summaries of the Papers Read at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Tsukuba English Linguistic Society>)

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