Object Mass Nouns in Japanese

Abstract

Classifier languages are commonly taken to have no grammaticized lexical mass/count distinction, but rather have this distinction encoded through the syntax and semantics of classifiers (e.g. [4], [5], [15], [17]). We contest this claim by drawing on data from Japanese. We provide novel empirical evidence showing that Japanese has quantifiers (e.g. nan-byaku to iu ‘hundreds of’) which directly select only for nouns denoting atomic entities (onna no hito ‘woman’) without requiring any classifier support. Moreover, the selectional restrictions of such quantifiers lead us to identify a class of object mass nouns in Japanese, i.e. nouns that have atomic entities in their denotation and yet are infelicitous in syntactic environments which are diagnostic of count nouns. This contradicts the prediction in [5] that object mass nouns should not exist in classifier languages. If Japanese has object mass nouns, then we should be ready to accept that Japanese nominal system is endowed with a grammatical mass/count distinction, and one which bears a certain resemblance to that which we find in number marking languages (e.g. English). We propose a novel semantic analysis of Japanese lexical nouns and classifiers, based on Sutton & Filip [21], a framework that unites notions of context in Rothstein [16] and Landman [12], and motivates the idea that counting contexts can remove overlap so that count nouns have disjoint counting bases while mass nouns do not.