Conspiracy of form and context for proper semantic interpretation: The implications of lonesome numeral classifiers in Japanese

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.