THE PLURAL MORPHEME -TACHI IN JAPANESE

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.