The Syntactic And Semantic Account Of The Relation Between Nouns And Classifiers In Mandarin Chinese

Since Chinese is a language rich in classifier but poor in number morphology,and whether the suffix-men is a plural marker is also controversial,many scholars doubt the existence of the count/mass distinction in Chinese nouns.This paper intends to give evidence to support the existence of this distinction and explore the relation between classifiers and nouns.This paper compares Chinese with English and finds out that the dichotomy between nouns exists in both languages,and agrees with Wiltschko(2012)’s opinion that the count/mass distinction manifests itself differently across languages.The evidence supporting this claim is from 5 aspects: the plural marker-men,the use of different classifiers,dimension adjectives,the nominal suffix-zi,and the count/mass shift in Chinese.This thesis holds the opinion that-men is a plural marker with collective meaning and definite meaning.Besides,since the different syntactic and semantic performances of count nouns,this paper proposes that there is a hierarchy of nouns’ countability,and the countability of Chinese nouns can be graded into five levels by four features of nouns: humanness,animacy,dimensionality and divisiveness.There are three ways to distinguish whether a syntactic element is a classifier:numerability,reduplication,yi-ellipsis.And classifiers can be divided into five types:individual classifiers,partitive classifiers,collective classifiers,kind classifiers,and each kind of them has specific ways to distinguish them.With a theoretical framework based on Phase Theory,this paper believes that there are two phases in Chinese noun phrases,DP and n P.The projection n P is headed by a light noun n and has NP headed by a lexical noun N as its complement.Classifiers in Chinese are base-generated at the same position,the head position Cl of Cl P,and Cl P is at the modifier position of N.So the relation between nouns and classifiers is the relation between a head and its modifier.The two features [±count] and [±collective]are used to mark classifiers,and nouns are marked by the feature [±count].[+count] or[-count] nouns will select classifiers with a corresponding feature.In this thesis,it is hypothesized that the light noun n is strong in ancient Chinese but weak in Modern Chinese,which can explain why the [N+Num+Cl] structures were frequently used in ancient Chinese,while [Num + Cl + N] structures are common in Modern Chinese.In addition,this paper tries to explain the distribution difference when the plural marker-men co-occurs with different kinds of classifiers.It proposes that the plural suffix-men should be either [-definite,+collective] or [+definite,+collective],and it is generated at the head position of Num P,which is a projection higher than n P but lower than DP.When-men is [+definite,+collective],it will be attracted to D position since D is a strong head.Then the lexical noun N,as the proper host of-men,will also be attracted to D.If the suffix-men is [-definite,+collective],it will be lowered to the lexical noun N by the operation Affix Lowering.So the classifier must be[+collective] to achieve the agreement between heads and modifiers,which can explain why individual classifier cannot appear in [Num + Cl + N + men] structures.