Notes on nominal ellipsis and the nature of no and classifiers in Japanese

• DOI: 10.1007/s10831-009-9052-1
• Publication Date: 2009-11-17T10:42:59Z
• Authors: Akira Watanabe
• Keywords: Numeral system; Ellipsis (linguistics); Genitive case; Comparative linguistics

This paper investigates ellipsis within nominals in Japanese with reference to a wider range of data than that considered by Saito et al. (JEAL 17: 247– 271, 2008). It is shown that the interaction with ellipsis reveals two types of no, a genitive case particle and a linking element inserted morphologically. To accommodate the additional ellipsis data, the analysis that treats the numeral-classifier sequence as an adjunct to NP must be rejected.