The Plural Morpheme -tachi in Japanese
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the existence of plural morphemes in Japanese, a language where nouns are not marked for Gender or Number whatsoever. Nonetheless, there seems to be a restricted number of morphemes like -tachi or -gata which are adjoined lexically to a Noun Phrase in order to render it plural. As a matter of fact, I chose to analyze these morphemes with the sole purpose to understand whether they help convery numerosity in Japanese in a similar manner as the plural morpheme -s does in English. One important aspect of the problem is that we can further show that these two plural morphemes help convey definiteness in Japanese, since they bear with themselves a plus of semantic content, which otherwise it would be deemed non-existent.
Author: Hagiu A.
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7081629646
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