Masao Ochi NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS , PLURAL / COLLECTIVE ELEMENTS , AND NOMINAL ELLIPSIS

There are many important theoretical issues surrounding the syntax of noun phrases in classifier languages such as Chinese and Japanese. For example, because the numeral classifier (NC) occurs in several syntactic environments in Japanese (e.g., prenominally, postnominally, and floating), a question arises with regard to their relations, that is, whether or not they should be analyzed as arising from the same underlying source (see Watanabe 2006). More broadly speaking, the question about the presence (or absence) of ‘extended’ projections in Japanese, both in the clausal and nominal domains, has been a topic of intense debate for several decades (see Fukui 1986, Fukui and Sakai 2003, Chierchia 1998a,b, and a series of recent papers by Bošković among many others). Against this background, I will investigate the syntax of noun phrases in Japanese, by primarily focusing on the ways in which the NC interacts with the plural/collective element and the universal quantifier. I will discuss three issues in this connection. First, following Li (1999), I will motivate a syntactic dependency involving the plural/collective element and an abstract functional head in Chinese and Japanese. Second, I will discuss how the NC interacts with a universal quantifier inside and outside the nominal domain (see also Kawashima 1998). Finally, I will discuss some nominal ellipsis paradigms in light of the syntax of classifiers explored in this paper. It should be noted at the outset of this paper that each of the issues to be discussed below deserves much more careful scrutiny. What is reported here is preliminary in a number of respects.