East Asian Linguistics Workshop: “When relative clauses contain quantitative expressions: A contrastive linguistic study of English and Japanese,” Hideki Tanaka
(521 Memorial Way)
Abstract:
In this study, we will investigate how relative clauses containing quantitative expressions are interpreted in English and Japanese (e.g., the book that I bought two copies of and watasi-ga 2-satu katta hon). We will demonstrate that in both languages, the antecedent and the quantitative expression have a part-whole relationship in a broad sense, with the antecedent denoting the whole and the quantitative expression denoting the part. This characteristic leads to contrasting behaviors of some nouns, classifiers and verbs. We will also focus on the Japanese synonymous adjectives, ooku (多く) and ooi (多い), both of which correspond to many, and argue that ooi functions as a quantitative expression in a relative clause. Furthermore, we will examine whether a part-whole relation can be involved in the interpretation of noun-modifying clause constructions, which have been discussed since Matsumoto (1988).
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Hideki Tanaka is Professor of Linguistics at YOKOHAMA National University in Japan. He earned a doctoral degree in linguistics from Tsukuba University in Japan. His main research interests lie in contrastive linguistics between English and Japanese. He focuses on the syntactic and semantic aspects on quantitative expressions and relative clauses. He is the author of Eigo to nihongo ni okeru suuryou-hyougen to kankeisetu no kaishaku ni kansuru kijututeki/ rironteki kenkyuu (A descriptive and theoretical study of the interpretation of quantitative expressions and relative clauses in English and Japanese), Kaitakusha, Tokyo, 2015.