Floating Quantifiers in Japanese as Adverbial Anaphora

Abstract

A surface-based analysis of so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) in Japanese is proposed based on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Minimal Recursion Semantics. We hypothesize that sentences with FQs, as other sentences, are processed incrementally from left to right and that an FQ has an independent semantic representation as NP that is anaphorically related to its antecedent. On these assumptions, we account for the asymmetry between the subject and object in terms of the quantification by a non-adjacent FQ. We also address a kind of FQ construction that has hitherto escaped the researchers’ attention, that with a whole-part relationship between the FQ and its host, and show that it is explained by the framework we bring forward.