Abstract
Japanese does not have number morphology or agreement. Thus, a bare noun like inu ‘dog’ can refer to a single dog or more than one dog, depending on contexts. This fact has raised much controversy about whether grammatical number exists in Japanese and has led some researchers to regard Japanese as a language lacking number specification in bare nouns (Chierchia 1998; Martin 1975; Nakanishi & Tomioka 2004; Nomoto 2013) and abstract number/phi agreement (Fukui 1986, 1995, Kuroda 1988; Fukui and Sakai 2003, Saito 2007, 2017, among others). Recently, however, Watanabe (2017) has provided strong evidence against such views, based on partitive interpretations of bare nouns. In this paper, I uncover yet another novel piece of evidence for grammatical number specification in Japanese from indeterminates. Surprisingly, they are obligatorily specified for singular despite the lack of number morphology or classifier.
Highlights
Japanese does not have number morphology or agreement
Even though there are three plural morphemes -tati, -ra, and -domo, these are only optional and limited to human nouns. 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 1988; Fukui and Sakai 2003, Saito 2007, 2017, among others)
It is a mistake to conclude that Japanese lacks a category of grammatical number, merely based on the absence of overt number morphology and the presence of classifiers
Summary
Japanese does not have number morphology or agreement. a bare noun like inu ‘dog’ can refer to a single dog or more than one dog, depending on contexts. Example (7) with a bare noun hito ‘person’ is ambiguous between a distributive reading (i.e. the weight of each individual person was heavy) and a collective reading (i.e. the total weight of the people was heavy ( some of them may not be heavy)) This is not surprising because a bare noun in Japanese can be singular or plural. Assuming that a collective reading requires a plural noun or a mass noun, the fact that a collective reading disappears with universal indeterminate phrases in (8) shows that they are specified for singular number. If an indeterminate phrase in Japanese, like a bare noun, were ambiguous between singular and plural, it would be compatible with a collective predicate. There may be speakers who find (10d) marginally acceptable, but in that case, the sentence may have the same type reading as (i)
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