CLASSIFIERS AND PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES IN ENGLISH

The purpose of this article to bring into discussion the structure of classifiers and of prepositional phrases in English, in order to offer a parallel to Japanese similar constructions. As we know, the linguistic system of English employs definite and indefinite articles in order to express definiteness, but classifiers are also present mostly in the form of prepositional phrases. Unlike Japanese, where the nouns are intrinsically non-definite, nouns in English are either definite or indefinite. The only equivalent is in the form of mass nouns, who cannot be differentiated as a whole. For this reason, English makes use of classifiers so that these substances can be differentiated in the form of part of a sequence. However, the structure of classifiers is not the same as in Japanese, since here they are mostly prepositional phrases, while in Japanese they form a closed class of elements.