須藤靖直 (Yasutada Sudo) ロンドン大学ユニヴァーシティ・コレッジ (University College London)
The semantic role of classifiersOne popular explanation of the obligatory use of classifiers in languages like Japanese holds that nouns in these languages are all mass nouns and have 'uncountable denotations', which numerals cannot directly modify (Bunt 1985, Chierchia 1998, Krifka 2008, Scontras 2013, 2014, etc.). According to this idea, classifiers operate on noun denotations and make them somehow countable. However, recent research raises evidence against this view, arguing that there are nouns in classifier languages that have countable denotations (Bale & Barner 2009, Inagaki & Barner 2009, Barner, Inagaki & Li 2009). This hypothesis leaves open why classifiers are still obligatory with such nouns. One possibility is that classifiers are necessary for syntactic reasons, but evidence has been raised against this position (Sakai, Iwata, Riera, Wan Yokoyama, Shimoda, Kawashima, Yoshimoto and Koizumi 2006, Kanero, Imai, Okada & Hashino 2015). I propose a semantic explanation for the obligatory use of classifiers in languages like Japanese, according to which classifiers are necessary due to the semantics of numerals, rather than the semantics of nouns (cf. Krifka 1995, Bale & Coon 2014). I propose that numerals in Japanese can only be used to name number concepts, and classifiers turn them into modifiers/predicates, unlike in languages like English where numerals have multiple semantic functions (Rothstein 2010).