Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese

Abstract

The quantificational system in Japanese makes use of so-called indeterminate pronouns, which take on existential, universal, interrogative, negative polarity, or free choice interpretations depending on what operator they associate with. Similar systems are found crosslinguistically, which raises the question as to what makes such system look so different from more familiar determiner quantification systems. This paper takes a first step toward answering this question by presenting an analysis of the German indeterminate pronoun or determiner irgendein from a Japanese point of view.