To appear in Michael Daniel and Paolo Acquaviva, eds., Mouton Handbook of Number. 1 Number in Japonic Family Michinori SHIMOJI 1 Overview of the number category in Japonic Family The Japonic language family comprises Japanese and Ryukyuan. Ryukyuan is a group of endangered languages spoken in an island chain called Ryukyu Archipelago, which lies between Japan’s mainland and Taiwan. Ryukyuan itself divides into two major subgroups, Northern Ryukyuan and Southern Ryukyuan (Pellard 2015). Japanese and Ryukyuan do not have mutual intelligibility, nor do Northern and Southern Ryukyuan languages (Shimoji 2010). Japonic languages and their sub-varieties are typologically not homogeneous, but they do share a number of basic clause- and phrase-structural properties, i.e. verb-final, modifier-head order and dependent marking. Generally speaking, Japonic languages have agglutinating morphology. Suffixes and enclitics abound while prefixes and proclitics are scarce. In addition to affixation, compounding and reduplication are also common in word formation. Most Japonic varieties display the nominative-accusative alignment pattern. With regard to number, most Japonic languages have a dichotomic number system in which singular and plural are distinguished, while some Ryukyuan varieties, especially Amami (Northern Ryukyuan), have a trichotomic system where singular, plural and dual are distinguished for personal pronouns (Section 2.2.2). The distinction in clusivity for the first person non-singular, i.e. exclusive and inclusive, is also common in Ryukyuan while it is totally absent in mainland Japanese varieties (Section 2.2.2). Pronouns and lexical nouns differ in number marking in two major ways. First, number marking is obligatory in pronouns. Second, as briefly noted above, in most dialects a marked number such as dual is found in pronouns and not in lexical nouns, and if there is dual in lexical nouns then there is dual in pronouns as well. As will be discussed in detail in Section 2, the lexical category ‘address noun’ should be identified in describing number in many Japonic languages, in such a way that certain plural marking strategies are restricted to pronouns and address nouns but not in the other lexical nouns, etc. Plural marking may take different forms in most Japonic varieties, but the differential plural marking is not sensitive to the semantic difference between associative and additive plurals, but to the lexical class of the noun to which the marker is attached. For example, in the Irabu dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan, the plural marker for address nouns (kin terms and proper names) is -ta, while the plural marker for animate (including human) nouns is -mmi. The form zjunzi-ta, i.e. the plural form of the proper name zjunzi, may be interpreted either as a group of people represented by zjunzi or, much less commonly, as more than one person named zjunzi, though the latter interpretation is pragmatically and conventionally hardly natural for native speakers. Likewise, the human common noun siitu ‘student’ is pluralized with -mmi, and the resulting form siitu-mmi may either be interpreted as a group of people associated with a particular, highly individuated student or as more than one student. What determines the semantic interpretation in terms of associative vs. additive plurality is the degree of individuation of the noun being pluralized, i.e. its position in the animacy- definiteness hierarchy. In what follows I will start each section with an overview of Standard Japanese (SJ), followed by a sketch of dialectal variation with respect to the feature discussed in the section. In doing so I will try to deal with as many features of typological interest as possible, taking