Anaphoric Treatment of Floating Quantifiers in Japanese and Grammar Implementation

Masahiro Kobayashi (Tottori University)

This talk proposes an approach to the interpretation of the floating quantifier construction in Japanese based on the framework of Dynamic Syntax. A syntactic issue of floating quantifiers I will address in this talk is the well-known problem which is called subject-object asymmetry (Saito 1985). The floating quantifiers exhibit the asymmetry that in the canonical word order (SOV) the subject-oriented quantifiers need to be adjacent to the subject NP while the object-oriented quantifiers can be separated from the object NP in the scrambled word order. The semantic phenomenon I tackled is that some floating quantifiers and NPs show the part-whole relationship. In this approach the floating quantifiers are introduced as an unfixed node which is fixed in the later stage in the manner reminiscent of anaphors. The talk also illustrates the implementation of the system written in Prolog. In Dynamic Syntax the grammar implementation of parsing process is very important because its slogan is that knowing a language is knowing how to parse it (Cann et al. 2005: pp.1). The grammar system returns a set of possible tree structures at each step of processing. Some problems with the computational aspects of Dynamic Syntax and their solutions will be proposed.