A Week Derivational Approach to Korean and Japanese Numeral Quantifiers

Abstract

There have been basically three approaches to the floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) in Korean and Japanese: a predicate analysis (Miyagawa 1988, 1989, Shi 2000, Kim 2002, etc.), an adverbial analysis (Choi 1961, Fukushima 1991, 1992, Kang 2000, in press, etc.) and a derivational analysis (Haig 1980, Kim 1983, Park 1992, Kim 1998, etc.). In this paper, I observe sets of data in favor of the third approach but against the first two. The main characteristics of the data can be dealt with only when the associate common noun phrase (CNP) and the FNQ are viewed to constitute a syntactic unit at least at a certain level of representation. This paper also observes that FNQs are similar to post-nominal NQs but dissimilar from pre-nominal NQs in various syntactic and semantic aspects. Based on the observations, I lend support to a “week” version of derivational approach in which the FNQ structure derives from the post-nominal NQ structure but is derivationally unrelated to the pre-nominal NQ structure.