Specificity effects for Japanese, an articleless language

The Japanese language does not possess articles. Demonstratives do not obligatorily appear in the left periphery of noun phrases (NPs). Bare NPs can be definite and indefinite in a given context. However, when NPs combine with numeral classifiers (NCs), NPs encounter restrictions on interpretation. I account for them in the vein of specificity effects for this article-less language, in support of the phase DP theory (Chomsky 2004, 2008). The lack of an article is due to lexical reasons in the determiner system rather than due to a syntactic or semantic parametric difference in the Japanese language.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe