WHAT DO CLASSIFIERS CLASSIFY? MORPHOSYNTAX OF GENDER AND CLASSIFIERS IN JAPANESE

This paper is part of the research project that examines the functions and distributions of classifiers in Japanese and other classifier languages, comparing them to other noun classification systems and with other number and counting systems. This paper specifically seek to investigate whether classifiers in Japanese are instances of Noun Classes (found in, e.g., Bantu languages), grammatical gender (found in, e.g., French, German, Russian), or animacy gender. Close scrutiny of the past relevant literature is conducted to elucidate these structures, and to investigate their similarities and differences of these constructions. Linguistic data is also obtained from the judgments of native speakers. It is demonstrated that classifiers in Japanese do not pattern with Noun Classes or grammatical gender, in terms of their interactions with nouns and the flexibility. The introduction of constructions involving animacy gender, such as interrogatives and existential constructions, demonstrates that classifiers do not probe animacy gender of nouns. This paper presents some understudied applications of classifiers in Japanese, and offers a comparative study of the aforementioned constructions, which, in my shallow knowledge, have escaped attention in the past relevant literature. The work primarily examines classifiers in Japanese; nonetheless, it offers significant implications for other classifier languages as well as non-classifier languages with respect to number, counting properties, and the mass-count distinction.

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