TITLE:
Prosody and Quantifier Float in Japanese
AUTHORS:
Kenji Yokota
KEYWORDS:
Floating Numeral Quantifiers; Japanese; Prosody; Syntax; Information Structure
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.3 No.1,
March
29,
2013
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 information-structure) which contribute to the disambiguation of the two readings (and hence the grammaticality).