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Prosody and Quantifier Float in Japanese
College of Industrial Technology, Nihon University, Japan
- 1 College of Industrial Technology, Nihon University, Japan
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics·Volume 03 (2013)·Pages 87–93·Published 29 March 2013·DOI10.4236/ojml.2013.31011
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Abstract
The paper investigates the information structure that licenses the Japanese floating numeral quantifier (FNQ) in terms of prosody and context from the point of view that the pitch reset on the FNQ affects the information structure and plays a crucial role in determining the interpretation of the FNQ. I will show that FNQ sentences are potentially ambiguous between an event-quantifier reading (i.e., a VP-related FNQ reading), and an object-quantifier reading (i.e., an NP-related FNQ reading) where such a reading is possible. The syntactic and semantic difference yields distinct prosodic phrasings (in accordance with i n formation-structure) which contribute to the disambiguation of the two readings (and hence the gram maticality).
KeywordsFloating Numeral QuantifiersJapaneseProsodySyntaxInformation Structure
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