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On the Semantics of Classifiers in Chinese

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On the Semantics of Classifiers in Chinese On the semantics of classifiers in Chinese Xu-Ping Li Department of English Submitted to the Senate of Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel June 2011 This work was carried out under the supervision of Professor Susan Rothstein Department of English Bar-Ilan University Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Susan Rothstein, my dissertation advisor. From her, I not only learned linguistics but also how to be a linguist. I thank her for the many hours she invested in discussing and debating ideas with me and for her great patience and confidence in me. Her influence can be seen throughout the dissertation. I also want to express my gratitude to Fred Landman. His teaching and Susan’s frequent reference to his work make him another role model for me. I was fortunate enough to have Fred edit this dissertation. He did far more than what a normal proofreader could and would have done. Special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of this dissertation for valuable suggestions and criticisms which improved the dissertation in important aspects. Greg Carlson gave me very helpful feedback, for which I thank him very much. I also thank Aldo Sevi for translating the abstract into Hebrew. Thanks as well to my teachers in Israel. At Bar-Ilan University, Yael Greenberg and Susan Rothstein taught me formal semantics, and Gabi Danon taught me generative syntax. At Tel Aviv University, I was taught by Nirit Kadmon and Fred Landman. I wish to thank Walter Bisang and Hilary Chappell. In my third year, Walter invited me as a ‘Gastwissenschaftler’ (visiting researcher) at the University of Mainz, Germany. With him, I worked on classifiers in different Chinese dialects, which formed the basis for Chapter 6 of the dissertation. Hilary Chappell accepted me as a member of her ERC-Sinotype Project in my fourth year. From her, I learned how to look at language from a typological perspective. I also thank Lisa Cheng and Rint Sybesma for the discussions on classifiers which we had on various occasions. Thanks also go to Victor Pan and Waltraud Paul for discussing with me some of the syntactic issues related to the topics covered in the dissertation. Almost all the chapters of this dissertation were presented at conferences or seminars, including ConSOLE-16, EACL-5, IACL-17, IsCLL-12, LOLA-10, the Paris Genericity Workshop in 2009, TEAL-6, and seminar talks at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Bar-Ilan University. Thanks to all the audiences at those conferences. Special mention is due to Edit Doron, MiaoLing Hsieh, James Huang, Manfred Krifka, Luther Liu, Jane Tang, Niina Zhang, and Benjamin Tsou, who gave me insightful feedback on the talks. I wish to thank all my friends who always cheered me up or offered their hands to me whenever I needed them: Jenna Belobersycky, Pavel Braginsky, Henia Gal, Armenuhi Grigorian, Yu-Chun Hung, Franziska Kretzschmar, Xinliang Liang, Victor Pan, Chong Qi, Aldo Sevi, Luming Wang, Smadar Wisper, and Wei Zhang. I would like to thank my family in China, who supported me unconditionally for so many years, even though they never knew what I was doing in the field. Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the financial support from various sources during my doctoral study: the four-year Presidential Fellowship from Bar Ilan University, the one-year visiting researcher grant from the Language Typology Division (Prof. Walter Bisang) of the Linguistics Department at the University of Mainz, and the funding in my final year from the Sinotype Project (directed by Prof. Hilary Chappell) of the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 230388. Table of contents Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….…………….i-v Chapter 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………1 1. Research objectives and data …………………………………………………………….1 2. The realm of classifiers in Chinese ….….………..………………………………… 2 2.1 Chinese as a number-less and article-less language ...……..……………..…. 2 2.2 Chinese as a classifier language …………………..…….………………………4 3. Basic semantic issues of Chinese classifier phrases …..….………………………………8 3.1 The mass/count distinction of Chinese nominals ….……..………………………… 8 3.1.1 The mass approach ………..…...….…..……..……………………….……… 8 3.1.2 The mass/count approach ……..…………..…..……….…...………………..10 3.2 Interpretation of Chinese bare nouns ……….……..………………………………..12 3.3 Counting/measure functions of Chinese classifiers ………...………………………13 3.3.1 Counting function of classifiers ……..…….….....…………………………...14 3.3.2 Measure function of classifiers ….….………....…..…………………………16 4. Overview of the dissertation ……………….……………………………………………18 Chapter 2 Mass/count distinction in Chinese revisited …………………………………..21 1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………..21 2. The syntactic distinction between mass and count classifiers ……………………….…21 2.1 Introduction to mass/count classifiers ……..........……….……………………….. .22 2.2 Lexical/functional distinction of classifiers ….....…..…..…………………….…….24 2.3 Two syntactic diagnostics …………....….……..…..……………………………….25 3. Reexamination of the two diagnostics ………………………………………………….30 3.1 Diagnostic 1: Possibility of pre-classifier adjectives ……….………………………31 3.2 Diagnostic 2: Optionality of post-classifier de …………..…….………………...….35 4. Classifiers as a unified category ………………………………………………………...40 4.1 Classifiers are all nominal in nature ……….....……….…………………………….41 4.2 A uniform syntactic projection ………………………..…………………………….45 5. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..51 Chapter 3 Semantics of bare nouns in Chinese …………………………………………...52 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………52 2. Bare nouns as kind terms ………………………………………………………………...54 2.1 Strong kind-inducing contexts ……………………………………………………….55 2.2 Appositives …………………………………………………………………………...57 2.3 Scope w.r.t. opacity …………………………………………………………………..59 2.4 Scope w.r.t. quantifiers ………………………………………………………………63 2.5 Semantics of bare nouns ……………………………………………………………..65 3. Bare predictions ………………………………………………………………………….67 3.1 Some analyses of copula clauses ………………………..…………………………...68 3.1.1 Ambiguous BEs………………………………………………………………...68 3.1.2 One unambiguous BE ………………………………………………………….70 3.2 Post-copula bare nouns as predicates of individuals ……………..………………….72 3.3 Post-copula bare nouns as predicates of subkinds ………………….……………….77 3.4 Post-copula bare nouns as predicates of kinds ……………………..………………..79 4. Definite bare nouns ……………………………………………………………………....81 4.1 Topichood and definiteness ……………………………………………………….…82 4.2 Definite bare nouns in object positions…………………………………………….....85 4.3 Semantics of definite bare nouns ………..………………………………………..….86 5. Three kinds expressions referring to kinds: bare Ns, N-lei , and kind ClPs ……………..88 5.1 Bare nouns in generic sentences……………………………………………………...88 5.2 Kind ClPs in generic sentences ………………………………………………………90 5.3 N-lei in generic sentences ……………………………………………………………94 6. Conclusion ………………………………………..……………………………………...98 Chapter 4 Semantics of classifiers: counting and measuring …………………..………..99 1. Introduction …………………………………………………..…………………………..99 2. Classifications of classifiers …………...……………………………..………………....111 2.1 A unified treatment of classifiers ………………………………..……………….....111 2.2 Dichotomies of classifiers …………………………………………………………..104 2.2.1 A functional distinction between classifiers and measure words…………...104 2.2.2 A syntactic distinction between mass and count classifiers ………………...106 2.3 A four-way distinction of classifiers ……………………….……………………….106 3. Counting and measure readings as a grammatically relevant phenomenon ……………109 3.1 Counting and measure readings cross-linguistically ………………..……………...110 3.2 Counting and measure readings of container classifiers in Chinese………………...112 3.3 The syntax of counting and measure readings ………….…………………………..119 4. A feature analysis of classifiers: [±Counting, ±Measure]……...………………………..121 4.1 Four types of classifiers……………………………………………………………..121 4.1.1 Type 1 [+C, -M] classifiers …………………………………………………121 4.1.2 Type 2 [-C, +M] classifiers………………………………………………….126 4.1.3 Type 3 [+C, +M] classifiers ………………………………………………...128 4.1.4 Type 4 [-C, -M] classifiers ………………………………………………….129 4.1.5 Concluding remarks ……………………...…………………………………131 4.2 Syntactic support for the classification ….………………………………………….132 4.3 Semantic shiftings between counting and measure readings ……..………………...137 5. Semantics of classifiers: counting and measuring………………………………………140 5.1 Krifka’s (1995) semantics for Chinese classifiers ………………………………….141 5.2 Rothstein’s (2010) semantics for English classifiers………………………………..143 5.3 Semantics for Chinese classifiers …………………………………………………...146 5.3.1 Semantics for classifiers on the counting reading …………………………..146 5.3.2 Semantics for classifiers on the measure reading …………………………..150 6. Conclusion ….…………………………………………………………………………..152 Chapter 5 Semantics of pre-classifier adjectives and post-classifier de ………..……….153 1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………..153 2. Pre-classifier adjectival modification …………………………………………………...154 2.1 Distribution patterns of pre-classifier adjectives ………………………..………….154 2.2 The modificational relation of pre-classifier adjectives …………………………….159 2.2.1 Adjectives before [+C, +M] classifiers ……………………………………….159 2.2.2 Adjectives before [+C, -M] classifiers ………………………………………..162 2.3 Pre-classifier adjectives modifying “Cl+N” ………………………………………164 2.3.1 Consumption context ……………………………………………………….164 2.3.2 Context of significance ……………………………………………………..165 2.3.3 Contrastive context …………………………………………………………166 2.4
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