Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/45582

Japanese quantifiers can separate from their original position in a noun phrase and be located in front of a main verb. This phenomenon is very common in Japanese as is seen in (1) (1) Watashi-wa hon-wo 3-satsu kaimasita. It is seen also in English and Spanish but with many constraints. In this brief article I examine this phenomenon contrastively among these three languages. The article is based on some published studies, and I owe much of the data to Mihara (1998d) and Furukawa (1999). I show how the phenomenon differs from one language to another and emphasize the importance of further theoretical analysis based on accurate linguistic description.