Premium
Measure Words as Nouns: A Perspective From Silent Years
Author(s) -
Watanabe Akira
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.2012.01190.x
Subject(s) - noun , numeral system , linguistics , perspective (graphical) , measure (data warehouse) , argument (complex analysis) , meaning (existential) , head (geology) , proper noun , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , mathematics , philosophy , medicine , database , geomorphology , psychotherapist , geology
. This paper presents a novel type of evidence that measure words are nouns, not classifiers, in languages with numeral classifiers. The argument is based on striking similarities exhibited by expressions in English and in Japanese having to do with human age, especially when the head noun corresponding to ‘year’ is apparently missing. The most straightforward way of capturing these similarities is to treat measure words as nouns and posit a silent noun meaning ‘year’ in both languages.