Research Outline

I conduct research on quantifiers in modern Japanese. Quantifiers are linguistic forms that express number or quantity, such as “sannin,” “gomai,” “ni-sanjikan,” and “oyosojyusatu.” At first glance, they may appear to simply indicate quantity; however, in reality, they play an important role in generating a wide range of meanings and nuances within a sentence.

In traditional Japanese linguistics, research has mainly focused on specific phenomena, such as the classification of classifiers and floating quantifier constructions. In contrast, my research aims to take a more comprehensive approach to numeral classifiers. Specifically, I analyze them from multiple perspectives—including morphology and lexicon, semantics and syntax, as well as pragmatics—in an integrated manner, in order to clarify how numeral classifiers contribute to meaning construction in sentences.