Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
934051 Journal of Pragmatics 2007 30 Pages PDF
Abstract

Semantic flexibility and pragmatic dynamism of numeral classifiers in Japanese are witnessed through their unexpected behavior in giving rise to ‘unusual looking’ constituents. The unusual constituents are pernicious from a point of view upholding the concept of rigid/stereotypical syntactic constituency often presupposed by traditional theories of syntax. Following Fukushima (2002, 2003), it is argued that, in order to capture such apparently odd behavior of numeral classifiers, an ‘inclusive’ grammatical framework is effective and adequate, which is capable of simultaneously synthesizing information pertaining to both form and context.

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Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics