The mass/count distinction in Japanese from the perspective of partitivity

Abstract

This article presents a novel set of observations concerning partitive constructions that indicate that bare nouns in Japanese can be marked with the singular/plural distinction, despite the absence of its overt morphological reflection. The new data set challenges the currently dominant view that bare nouns are number-neutral in classifier languages. A way of accommodating the phenomenon with the syntactically represented singular/plural distinction is provided. Implications for noun classification are also discussed. It is then concluded that it is a mistake to regard Japanese nouns with count semantics as furniture-type nouns and that we need to recognize the familiar mass/count distinction in the language.

The singularity of indeterminates: Number specification without classifiers

“…The present results still have many ramifications, however. First, it follows that Japanese does have a category of grammatical number, supporting Watanabe (2010Watanabe ( , 2017. Its existence is naturally expected, if Hiraiwa's (2017a) claim that grammatical number (singular-dual-plural) is founded on the Approximate Number System (ANS) and hence universally available to the human language faculty (see Feigenson, Dehaene, and Spelke 2004 for the ANS and Hiraiwa 2017a for a hypothesis about how capacities for natural numbers could arise from integrating the two cognitive systems of number and Merge in Chomsky 2008).…”

“…This fact has raised much controversy about whether grammatical number exists in Japanese and led some researchers to regard Japanese as lacking number specification in bare nouns (Chierchia 1998;Martin 1975;Nakanishi & Tomioka 2004;Nomoto 2013) or abstract number/phi agreement (Fukui 1986, 1995, Kuroda 1988Fukui and Sakai 2003, Saito 2007. Recently, however, Watanabe (2017) has provided strong evidence against such views, based on partitive interpretations of bare nouns.…”

Collectivizers in Italian (and beyond). The interplay between collectivizing and evaluating morphology (and the Div paradox)

“…Specifically, among the Italian collectivizers, -amselects for both count and mass roots in (54a), -ummainly selects for count nouns and adjectives, in (54b), -icci-for mass nouns, adjectives and verbs roots, in (54c). 31 The stative nature of adjectival predicates can be distinguished from the interpretation associated to mass or verbal roots (but see Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2016, 2017. 32 A similar approach is suggested by Acquaviva (2009: 5), observing that "morphological and semantic information can be dependent on the choice of a root without being encoded on the root itself".…”

“…In fact, lexical roots appear to be already specified for (at least) the features [count/mass] in the lexicon (cf. Watanabe ), triggering a set of constraints in the interpretation/application of collectivizing devices of the type in (1). In keeping with Wiese () collectives conceptualize set(s) of individual referents, though understood as lacking a clear‐cut individuality (‘weak individuality', in the sense of Acquaviva ).…”

“…Consider also the empirical evidence from Japanese against the massness of roots, recently discussed inWatanabe (2017) and Sudo (to appear).…”