Semantic Features Of Individual Quantifiers And Tcfl

This article first discusses the origin and the development of the classifiers of the Chinese language. Then by analyzing their semantic features it sums up the five characteristics of the classifiers. And finally it explains their syntactic,semantic,pragmatic and cognitive issues in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.The classifiers originated before 200 BC,and flourished from 200 BC to 900 AD,and matured from 900 AD to 1400 AD. Their process of evolvement shows the inevitability of their existences and their importance in the Chinese language grammar.As a sub-class of the measure words of the modern Chinese language,the classifiers express the individual units of the relatively independent character of the things. They bear the semantic features such as individuality,metonymy,extensity,classification and universality. They reflect that the Chinese nation attach importance to the cognition and thinking in images and embody the vividness of the Chinese language.In the teaching of Chinese language as a foreign language,the study of the classifiers should run through from the elementary courses to the intermediate and advanced courses. The teacher should lead the foreign students to acquire the knowledge of the classifiers,such as the basic syntax function,the two-way selection with the nouns,the gemination,the usage of being qualified by adjectives or adverbs,and the synonym discrimination.