Classifiers are for specification: Complementary functions for sortal and general classifiers in Cantonese and Mandarin

Cahiers de Linguistique d'Asie Orientale

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 33-69

  Erbaugh, Mary S ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Cantonese; Categorization; Classifiers; Connectionism; Mandarin

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248743397     PISSN: 01533320     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3406/clao.2002.1602     Document Type: Article

References (2)

1. Japanese classifiers are even more heavily concentrated. Downing (1996, p. 55) finds that seven classifiers account for 85% of tokens. They are the classifiers for humans, inanimate objects, animals, elongated objects, flat thin objects, buildings, and small, 3-D objects (nin,tsu, hiki,hon,mai,ken,ko). These characters were borrowed from Chinese over a thousand years ago, so their modern Mandarin meaning has shifted greatly. The Japanese classifier for humans is the modern Mandarin noun 'human' ren. The inanimate objects classifier no longer exists in Chinese. The 'animal' CL is almost entirely restricted to horses. The 'elongated objects' CL refers almost exclusively to books. The 'flat thin objects' CL refers largely to needles and badges. The 'building' CL is an archaic adjective for 'lofty, glorious', (and a Cantonese and Southern Min noun for stores and restaurants). The 'small 3-D' CL is now the general classifier, also used for humans. But it derived historically from long, extended objects such as stalks of bamboo. Such semantic shifts argue against essentialist semantic claims for classifiers.
2. For conversation about current settings, Tao (1999) found more proximate 'this'. Mandarin zhe.