Linguistics Colloquium Feb. 26: Ochi

There will be a colloquium in the linguistics department this Friday, February 26. The speaker is Masao Ochi from Osaka University. He will give a talk on syntax entitled ‘On extended nominal projections in Japanese’. As always undergrads are welcome and encouraged to attend!

The abstract of the talk follows.

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On extended nominal projections in Japanese
Masao Ochi
Osaka University/Harvard University

The issue of whether or not languages vary with respect to the presence/absence of functional projections in the nominal domain has been an issue of interest from both syntactic and semantic points of view. In this talk, I will investigate the syntactic structure of nominal expressions in Japanese. I will approach this issue by highlighting an abstract functional head within the nominal domain which is relevant for specificity, thereby supporting the view that specificity is syntactically encoded in the nominal structure (Borer 2005 and Muromatsu 1998 among others).

The primary domain of investigation for this talk is the syntactic status of numeral classifiers (NCs).

(1) a. Taro-wa 10-ko-no gyooza-o tabe-ta.
Taro-Top 10-CL-Gen dumpling-Acc eat-Past
‘Taro ate 10 dumplings.’ (pre-nominal NC)
b. Taro-wa gyooza 10-ko-o tabe-ta.
Taro-Top dumpling 10-CL-Acc eat-Past
‘Taro ate 10 dumplings.’ (post-nominal NC)
c. Taro-wa gyooza-o (kinoo) 10-ko tabe-ta.
Taro-Top dumpling-Acc yesterday 10-CL eat-Past
‘Taro ate 10 dumplings.’ (‘stranded’ NC)

Based on new (and old) observations about specificity, scope, and ellipsis, I will advance a non-uniform analysis of the pre-nominal NC and the post-nominal NC: the post-nominal classifier is a head (Watanabe 2006 among many others) while the pre-nominal NC is a phrasal adjunct at the NP level (Saito et al. 2008 among others). It is further proposed that while the pre-nominal NC construction optionally comes with the functional projection under investigation, the post-nominal NC construction always possesses this extra layer to accommodate the NP movement internal to the nominal phrase. I will also discuss how this line of analysis allows us to approach the floating/stranded NC construction from a new perspective. In particular, I will entertain the idea that the stranded NC and the post-nominal NC essentially share the same underlying structure although they have slightly different numerations, and that stranding is in fact obligatory, not optional.