Quantity Name Structure. Sino-tibetan Word Order Studies

Numerically Quantified Noun Phrase (NQNP) is a noun phrase constructed by noun, numeral and classifier. The word orders of NQNP are various in Sino-Tibetan languages. It gives a detailed description on word order of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages in this paper. It also studies the rules of combination and evolution of NQNP with the theory and methodology of typology and comparative linguistics. This paper consists of six chapters, the main contents of which are as follows:Chapter â…  is an introduction, in which the origin and significance in theory and practice are explained, the object and area of the study are defined, the difficulty and innovations are pointed out, methods and sources of material within the study are also introduced.Chapter â…¡ is the review on NQNP study. The existing research achievements on NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages are summarized. It shows the imbalance that the achievements on NQNP in Chinese are rich and comprehensive, while that of other languages in Sino-Tibentan languages are less in quantity and quality. In a word, the achievements on NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages are abundant and comprehensive, but further study need to be done deeply and systematically. This paper gives a detailed and systematical description on NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages and analyzes the rules of combination and evolutionary chain of NQNP, which makes up for the lack of the research.Chapter III is the Word order of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages. This chapter consists of five sections. The word orders of NQNP are described comprehensively and synchronically according to the subgroups of Sino-Tibetan Family, as Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Zhuang-Dong, and Miao-Yao from section one to section four. The advantaged and disadvantaged word orders are also distinguished. In order to detect the agreement on word order between numeral phrases, adjective and demonstrative, which are modifiers in noun phrase, the orderly relation between adjective and NQNP, demonstrative and NQNP, adjective, demonstrative and NQNP are also studied in this paper.Three issues are discussed in section five, the first of which analyzes the orderly universals of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages. The second issue is about the relationship between NQNP and other parameters in word order. Fifty-seven languages in Sino-Tibetan are observed to count the relation of word order between verb and object, demonstrative and noun, adjective and noun, genitive and noun. The conclusion is numeral phrases which functioned as modifiers in NQNP have no implicational universal with other parameters functioned as modifiers of noun, such as adjective, demonstrative, and genitive. The third issue explains the phenomenon that some certain languages in Tibeto-Burman disobey the Universal20of Greenberg under the theory of identifiable elements initial.Chapter â…£ studies the motivation and evolution of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages, in which two issues are discussed. The first is the relationship between word order of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages and rules of organizing information. According to the theory of typology, it is considered that sentence word order is correlated with the rules of organizing information, head initial or head final. This theory is used to explain the motivation and evolution of the three dominant word orders of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages, which are Num+Cl+N, N+Num+Cl and N+Cl+Num.The second issue is about the relationship of language influence and word order of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages. Language contact produce language influences, and language influence lead to loan words and motivate the new word order. But language influence can only provide outer environment for the emergence of new word order, and the inner environment is the key point to determine the new word order.Chapter â…¤ discusses some phenomenon of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages under the view of typology. The first is ellipsis. In certain context, any element of NQNP, like Num, Cl and Noun can be omitted. While the situation when noun is omitted seems to be a substitution, in which the numeral phrase substitutes the NQNP. Consequently, the situation when noun is omitted is called default in this paper. The second is called phonetic combination, in which three problems are discussed. They are the objective condition that can produce phonetic combination, the types of phonetic combination of NQNP in Sino-Tibetan languages, and the characteristics of the combined words.The third is One+Cl+Noun construction, which discusses the particularities including the word order, ellipsis, optional numeral and grammatical ization. The fourth is loan words, which mainly analyzes the characteristics of the loan words in NQNP, and the influence produced by the loan words.Chapter â…¥ is conclusion. It is a summary to this paper, which emphasizes the main points including that Classifiers are one of the causes that make the word order of NQNP complex, the word orders of NQNP are restricted by multiple factors, NQNP of Chinese developed along two coexisting evolutionary chain, language contact is one of the factors that make the word order of NQNP change. Besides, some problems that needs to study further more are also raised, such as the progress that how NQNP developed, the particularity of word order in One+Cl+Noun, and whether individual classifiers are the final form of its grammaticalization.