助数詞選択と数量詞のレトリック

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe figurative uses of quantifiers in Japanese. A great deal of previous research on quantifiers has presupposed that a quantifier works on the modified noun phrase. As counterexamples to the previous description, this paper shows instances where quantifiers operate on phrases other than the noun phrases they modify, just in the same way as the transferred epithet (TE) in rhetoric. A typical example of TE-type quantifiers is like the following: Kono chiketto ga tatta ichi-mai no kibou da. 'This ticket is only one hope left.' Here, the quantifier ichi-mai comprises the number ichi and the classifier mai, which is used to count sheet-like objects. In the phrase of ichimai no kibou, the quantifier ichi-mai syntactically modifies the following noun kibou, and may result in semantic anomaly since kibou 'hope' itself does not refer to any concrete object. However, the expression in question can be interpretable because the quantifier ichi-mai is semantically compatible with another noun phrase, chiketto 'ticket'. In order that this discrepancy of quantification can be understood figuratively, there must be some motivation between the syntactically quantified entity and the semantically more appropriate quantified entity. Four types of associative relationships are proposed as cognitive motivations of TE-type quantifiers: (i) equivalence, (ii) similarity, (iii) categorization, and (iv) causation. The description in this paper shows the linguistic fact that there are counterexamples to the syntactic rules for quantification, and requests to accommodate the rules to instances of TE.