Formal Features of Noun Phrases in Japanese and English and the Definite/Indefinite Distinction

Abstract

Bare nouns are the nouns that are generally used by themselves without a determiner or a quantifier, such as children in Children are energetic. Although the study of bare nouns, together with the issue of the presence or absence of articles, has received extensive attention in the fields of linguistics and grammatical theory, no unified view has yet been established on how bare nouns in Japanese, which does not have articles, can be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to reexamine the mechanism by which the basic form of Japanese noun phrases, such as hon (lit. book), through the forms of English noun phrases that appear as a book, books, the book(s), is implicitly inherent in the basic form itself. The study revisits the reason it is necessary to assume the distinct Japanese grammatical categories of plain noun phrase and non-plain noun phrase with regard to predicational copula sentences. In particular, the study examines the validity of the idea that the mechanism represents a “procedural meaning.”