On the status of adjectival nouns in Japanese

In Japanese, there is a category called adjectival noun, which has traditionally been treated as different from adjectives. Miyagawa (1987) argues that adjectival nouns correspond to English adjectives whose status is [+ V, + N], while adjectives in Japanese are [+ V], the [+ N] feature being neutralized. The aim of this paper is to show that, contrary to Miyagawa's (1987) claim, adjectival nouns should be treated as members of the same category as adjectives, which is [+ V, + N], since the former behave exactly in a parallel fashion with the latter, and that it is not necessary to extend and complicate the feature system proposed in Chomsky (1970).