「たくさん」 is technically, but not practically, a na-nominal (形容動詞) , right? Dictionaries have listed as being either a noun or Googling "" returns only 190,000 hits; none of the top 20 pages are professional websites. Rather, they are only blogs. My impression is that, practically speaking, is used only as a noun? For some idiosyncratic reason, it's also listed as ? Can anyone shed some light as to what's going on? Is this issue related to the meaning of or just about that the word, , is exceptional? thanks.

> My impression is that, practically speaking, is used only as a noun?

Unless you belong to the school who believes that are really nouns, I don't think it's a noun, e.g. you cannot say *. And I don't see any examples in the goo dictionary that suggest it's more of a noun than any other .

> Is this issue related to the meaning of or just about that the word, , is exceptional?

I don't see anything exceptional about it. Some use , some use . This one usually uses , like e.g. .

I'm not sure why the goo dictionary doesn't list as an adverb, although it lists examples of adverbial use. This is quite common for of quantity and classifiers to be used adverbially

>
>