Contrastive syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic studies of noun phrases

1）比较日语与英语、德语等语言的名词范畴，考察其句法、语义和语用特征。Krifka（1989）、Chierchia（1998）等学者认为，在量词系统丰富的语言（如汉语和日语）中，既没有冠词，也没有复数语素，只有大量的名词类型作为名词范畴。他们声称，这种语言类型的所有名词都表示种类（类）。然而，我们指出，虽然日语名词在句法上对应于质量名词类型，但它们仍然表现出可数质量名词如“家具”和不可数质量名词如“水”的区别。前一种类型将最小单元引用为单个对象，并从谓词类型而不是种类类型开始。因此，Chierchia的名义映射参数（1997）应作修正。此外，我们还指出，德语和英语作为日耳曼语系的两种语言，在定冠词的行为方面表现出句法和语义上的差异，2）我们指出日语中有复数语素“-tachi”，并认为带有复数语素的名词表示复数宾语或与复数宾语相关联，如“-tachi”3）通过与英语和德语的对比分析，分析日语名词短语的类属意义。我们分析了日本的数量分类和他们的句法变化，如“三仁没有gakusei”或“gakusei三仁”（=三个学生），并认为他们是来自不同的底层句法结构。

1)We compare Japanese with English, German, and other languages with respect to noun categories, and investigate their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties. Previous studies including Krifka (1989), Chierchia (1998) etc. argue that there is only a mass noun type as noun categories in languages with rich classifier systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) that lack both articles and plural morphemes. They claim that all the nouns of this language type denote kinds (classes). However, we point out that although Japanese nouns correspond to mass noun type syntactically, they nonetheless show distinction of countable mass nouns like "furniture" and non-countable mass nouns like "water". The former type refers to a minimal unit as an individual object and starts from a predicate type instead of a kind type. Therefore, Chierchia's nominal mapping parameter (1997) should be revised. Furthermore, we point out that German and English, which belong to Germanic languages, show syntactic and semantic differences with respect to the behavior of definite articles, suggesting that the nominal mapping parameter is not sufficient to explain these properties.2)We point out that Japanese has plural morphemes "-tachi" and argues that the nouns with this plural denote plural objects or associate plural objects like "Taro and his friends".3)We analyze generic meanings of Japanese noun phrases in comparison with English and German. We analyze Japanese numeral classifiers and their syntactic variations like "san-nin-no gakusei" or "gakusei san-nin" (=three students) and argue that they are derived from different underlying syntactic structures.