A Typological Study On Dem-Clf-N Construction Word Order And Its Distribution

Most of the minority languages have classifiers in china. Classifiers are abundantand mainly used in Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic. This paper does not discuss asingle demonstrative or classifier but when they're present together .We mainlydiscuss the word order of"Dem-Clf-N"construction and typological distribution.Tibetan-Burmese are SOV word order, while Tai-Kadai Languages, Miao-Yao andAustro-Asiatic are SVO word order. This paper discusses the word order anddistribution of"Dem-Clf-N" construction in Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic.Chapter 1 concentrates on the typological study and theoretical background ofdomestic and foreign, as well as our research methods, and corpus sources oflanguage sample.Chapter 2 indicates the structure of"Dem-Clf-N"construction and introducessome relevant typological theories. Classifier in our paper only indicates the sortalnumeral classifiers. The theory of this paper is based on the principle ofcross-category harmony, "head- dependent "theory, the principle of SemanticHead-Proximity (SHP) and the pragmatic Identifiability Precedence Principle (IPP).Chapter 3 Discuss the word order of demonstrative, numeral, classifier, adjectiveand noun. It can be discovered that the possible word order is:"N-Adj-Dem-Num-Clf","N-Adj-Num-Clf-Dem","Dem-Num-Clf-N-Adj","Num-Clf-N-Adj- Dem", "Dem-N-Adj- Num-Clf". The feature is that numeral is always in front ofclassifier, while there is special circumstance that is when the numeral is" one ", theclassifier preposes the numeral. Adjective modifiers are always closest to the noun,and the dominant order is N-Adj.Chapter 4 discuss the word order of"Dem-Clf-N".it is discovered that only fourof six possible word orders can emerge as basic word order, which are Clf-N-Dem,N-Dem-Clf, N-Clf-Dem and Dem-Clf-N. The first two are dominant order, where therelative order of N-Dem is fixed while Clf is at the beginning or end.We explain theword order according three principles and also put up interfering factor(s) why thedemonstrative postposed.Chapter 5 discusses the cross-linguistic distribution of"Clf-N"constructionindicating the definiteness and the classifier as an attributive mark.