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24 - The Syntax of Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese

from Part Four - Syntax-semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

By
Li Julie Jiang ,
Peter Jenks  and
Jing Jin
Edited by
Chu-Ren Huang ,
Yen-Hwei Lin ,
I-Hsuan Chen  and
Yu-Yin Hsu
Chu-Ren Huang
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yen-Hwei Lin
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
I-Hsuan Chen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Yu-Yin Hsu
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Summary

This chapter aims to provide a careful examination of Mandarin Chinese classifiers from a syntactic perspective. A comprehensive overview of the distribution of classifiers is provided along with their syntactic analyses. A central conclusion of this chapter, following much recent work, is that there are two distinct structural configurations that numeral classifiers participate in, and that these structures can distinguish the type of classifier participating in the structure as well as its semantic interpretation. The syntactic analyses are complemented with formal semantic analyses of numeral classifiers.

Keywords

classifiernumeralnounsyntaxsemantics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 515 - 549
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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