The Countability Of Chinese Nouns From The View Of First Language Acquisition

The count-mass issue has been studied by numerous scholars across many different languages.Whether Chinese has the count-mass distinction is under debate(Chao,1968;Hansen,1983;Tai,1994;Kuo,2003;Tang,2005).Conclusively,scholars mainly hold two accounts for the count-mass distinction of Chinese nouns.The first account is a semantic one,which includes three arguments.Firstly,the count-mass distinction of Chinese nouns is judged based on their collocation constraints(Chao,1968).Count nouns occur with count classifiers and mass nouns occur with massifiers.Secondly,the semantic account holds that the existence of counting units lexically determines the count-mass status of Chinese nouns(Doetjes 1997).Thirdly,the semantic account holds that the count-mass distinction of Chinese nouns is judged according to the ontological properties of nouns' referents(Cheng & Sybesma,1998,1999,2005;Liu 2014).Count nouns refer to discrete and natural entities while mass nouns refer to amorphous substance or liquid.The second account is a syntactic one.It holds that Chinese bare nouns(Bare nouns refer to nouns without classifiers,e.g.,pingguo �apple' and niunai �milk')are underspecified in countability.Furthermore,when bare nouns occur with classifiers,classifiers play a decisive role in determining the countability of Chinese nouns(Borer,2005;Huang,2009;Huang & Lee,2009;Duan,2011;Zhang,2013;Liu,2014;Huang & Ursini,ms.).Nouns with classifiers can only be counted by number and assigned the individual-denoting reading.This study aims to investigate the countability of Chinese nouns.The significance of research is that we attempt to adjudicate the semantic account versus the syntactic account by conducting an empirical study on the countability of Chinese nouns and providing empirical evidence for the theoretical accounts.We designed four experiments to investigate whether two factors,the contextual information and the presence or absence of classifiers,would affect the count-mass distinction of Chinese nouns.The two research questions are listed as follows: 1)whether the countability of Chinese nouns is subject to change with the variation of non-linguistic context,the substance-oriented context and the individual-oriented context;2)whether the countability of Chinese nouns is subject to change with the variation of linguistic context,that is,the presence of classifiers or not.Two kinds of nouns were investigated,collective nouns(jiajv �furniture';canjv �silverware')and substance nouns(fanqiejiang �ketchup';yagao �toothpaste')in this study,which correspond to object-mass nouns and substance-mass nouns respectively in Barner and Snedeker's study(2005).The experimental method used in this study was Truth Value Judgment Task.We found that in Experiment 1 and 3,for most children,bare collective nouns and substance nouns could be assigned two kinds of readings,the substance-denoting reading and the individual-denoting reading;and for adults,a half of adults would assign both the individual-denoting reading and the substance-denoting reading to the bare Chinese collective nouns,while another half of adults would only assign the substance-denoting reading to the bare Chinese substance nouns.In Experiment 2 and 4,bare nouns with classifiers could only be assigned the individual-denoting reading both for children and adults.Based on the analysis of experimental data,we conclude that the countability of bare Chinese collective nouns and substance nouns is subject to change with the variation of contextual information.Moreover,the presence of classifiers plays the decisive role in determining the countability of these two kinds of Chinese nouns.This study provides some empirical support for the syntactic account(Borer,2005;Huang,2009;Huang & Lee,2009;Duan,2011;Zhang,2013;Liu,2014;Huang & Ursini,ms.).Under the condition that the flexible nouns(shengzi �string';shitou �stone')and count nouns(xiezi �shoe';zhuozi �desk')are not investigated in this study,more researches on these two kinds of nouns need to be carried out in the future.