(Non-) floating numeral quantifiers in Japanese

Kitaoka, Daiho (2014) (Non-) floating numeral quantifiers in Japanese. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to uncover syntactic and semantic properties of Floating Numeral Quantifiers (FNQ) in Japanese, and to introduce ‘non-floating’ quantifiers, i.e., manner adverbial quantifiers and topical adverbial quantifiers, which have no structural relations, such as constituency or locality, with the noun phrase they modify. First, it is explained which locations a floating quantifier may appear at, and how the distributions can be accounted for. Also, I show how scrambling plays a role in generating Quantifier Floating constructions. Second, I document such semantic properties of FNQ as distributivity, (non-) specificity, partitivity, relative scope, and resistance to scrambling effect. Last, I show two adverbial quantifiers, which do not show above-mentioned syntactic and semantic properties of FNQ. Manner adverbial quantifiers appear in a preverbal position, and allow a collective reading. Topical adverbial quantifiers occupy at the beginning of sentences, and take a scope in a different way from FNQs.

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