Chinese classifier

The modern Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifiers or measure words. One use of classifiers is when a noun is qualified by a numeral or demonstrative. In the Chinese equivalent of a phrase such as "three books" or "that person", it is normally necessary to insert an appropriate classifier between the numeral/demonstrative and the noun. For example, in Standard Chinese, the first of these phrases would be:

When a noun stands alone without any determiner, no classifier is needed. There are also various other uses of classifiers: for example, when placed after a noun rather than before it, or when repeated, a classifier signifies a plural or indefinite quantity.

The terms classifier and measure word are frequently used interchangeably and as equivalents of the Chinese term . However, the two are sometimes distinguished, with classifier denoting a particle without any particular meaning of its own, as in the example above, and measure word denoting a word for a particular quantity or measurement of something, such as 'drop', 'cupful', or 'liter'. The latter type also includes certain words denoting lengths of time, units of currency, etc. These two types are alternatively called count-classifier and mass-classifier, since the first type can only meaningfully be used with count nouns, while the second is used particularly with mass nouns. However, the grammatical behavior of words of the two types is largely identical.

Most nouns have one or more particular classifiers associated with them, often depending on the nature of the things they denote. For example, many nouns denoting flat objects such as tables, papers, beds, and benches use the classifier , whereas many long and thin objects use . The total number of classifiers in Chinese may be put at anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred, depending on how they are counted. The classifier , apart from being the standard classifier for many nouns, also serves as a general classifier, which may often be used in place of other classifiers; in informal and spoken language, native speakers tend to use this classifier far more than any other, even though they know which classifier is "correct" when asked. Mass-classifiers might be used with all sorts of nouns with which they make sense: for example, may be used to denote boxes of objects, such as light bulbs or books, even though those nouns would be used with their own appropriate count-classifiers if being counted as individual objects. Researchers have differing views as to how classifier–noun pairings arise: some regard them as being based on innate semantic features of the noun (for example, all nouns denoting "long" objects take a certain classifier because of their inherent length), while others see them as motivated more by analogy to prototypical pairings—for example, 'dictionary' comes to take the same classifier as the more common word 'book'. There is some variation in the pairings used, with speakers of different dialects often using different classifiers for the same item. Some linguists have proposed that the use of classifier phrases may be guided less by grammar and more by stylistic or pragmatic concerns on the part of a speaker who may be trying to foreground new or important information.

Many other languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area exhibit similar classifier systems, leading to speculation about the origins of the Chinese system. Ancient classifier-like constructions, which used a repeated noun rather than a special classifier, are attested in Old Chinese as early as 1400 BCE, but true classifiers did not appear in these phrases until much later. Originally, classifiers and numbers came after the noun rather than before, and probably moved before the noun sometime after 500 BCE. The use of classifiers did not become a mandatory part of Old Chinese grammar until around 1100 CE. Some nouns became associated with specific classifiers earlier than others; the earliest probably being nouns that signified culturally valued items such as horses and poems. Many words that are classifiers today started out as full nouns; in some cases their meanings have been gradually bleached away so that they are now used only as classifiers.

Usage

In Chinese, a numeral cannot usually quantify a noun by itself; instead, the language relies on classifiers, commonly also referred to as measure words. When a noun is preceded by a number, a demonstrative such as this or that, or certain quantifiers such as every, a classifier must normally be inserted before the noun. Thus, while English speakers say "one person" or "this person", Mandarin Chinese speakers say respectively:

If a noun is preceded by both a demonstrative and a number, the demonstrative comes first. (This is just as in English, e.g. "these three cats".) If an adjective modifies the noun, it typically comes after the classifier and before the noun. The general structure of a classifier phrase is

The tables below give examples of common types of classifier phrases. While most English nouns do not require classifiers or measure words (in English, both “five dogs” and “five cups of coffee” are grammatically correct), nearly all Chinese nouns do; thus, in the first table, phrases that have no classifier in English have one in Chinese.

{| style="border:1px solid darkgray; margin: 1em auto;"

|-style="height:30px"

! !! !! !! !! !! !! style="width:7%"|  !! English equivalent

| -- || || three || || || cat || || "three cats"

| -- || this || || || || cat || || "this cat"

| - || || three || || || || || "three (of them)"

| --- || || three || || black || cat || || "three black cats"

| ---- || this || three || || black || cat || || "these three black cats"

| -- || || three || || black || || || "three black ones"

|colspan="8" |

{| style="border:1px solid darkgray; margin: 1em auto;"

|-style="height:30px"

! !! !! !! !! !! !! style="width:7%"|  !! English equivalent

| -- || || five || || || cattle || || "five head of cattle"

| -- || this || || || || cattle || || "this head of cattle"

| - || || five || || || || || "five head"

| --- || || five || || big || cattle || || "five head of big cattle"

| ---- || this || five || || big || cattle || || "these five head of big cattle"

| -- || || five || || big || || || "five head of big ones"

|colspan="8" |

On the other hand, when a noun is not counted or introduced with a demonstrative, a classifier is not necessary: for example, there is a classifier in

but not in

Furthermore, numbers and demonstratives are often not required in Chinese, so speakers may choose not to use one—and thus not to use a classifier. For example, to say "Zhang San turned into a tree", both are acceptable: The use of classifiers after demonstratives is in fact optional.

It is also possible for a classifier alone to qualify a noun, the numeral being omitted, as in

Specialized uses

right|thumb|The phrase has the classifier after the noun. It could refer, for example, to "the cars on the road".|alt=A traffic jam

In addition to their uses with numbers and demonstratives, classifiers have some other functions. A classifier placed after a noun expresses a plural or indefinite quantity of it. For example:

whereas the standard pre-nominal construction

Many classifiers may be reduplicated to mean 'every'. For example:

A classifier used along with 一 ( 'one') and after a noun conveys a meaning close to 'all of' or 'the entire' or 'a ___full of'. This sentence uses the classifier  ( 'slice'), which refers to the sky, not the clouds.

Classifiers may also indicate possession. For example, the Standard Chinese equivalent of 'my book' would often be  (), but in Cantonese this would typically be expressed as

with the classifier serving as a possessive marker roughly equivalent to English s.

Types

The vast majority of classifiers are those that count or classify nouns (nominal classifiers, as in all the examples given so far, as opposed to verbal classifiers). These are further subdivided into count-classifiers and mass-classifiers, described below. In everyday speech, people often use the term "measure word", or its literal Chinese equivalent  , to cover all Chinese count-classifiers and mass-classifiers, but the types of words grouped under this term are not all the same. Specifically, the various types of classifiers exhibit numerous differences in meaning, in the kinds of words they attach to, and in syntactic behavior.

Chinese has a large number of nominal classifiers; estimates of the number in Mandarin range from "several dozen" or "about 50", to over 900. The range is so large because some of these estimates include all types of classifiers while others include only count-classifiers, and because the idea of what constitutes a "classifier" has changed over time. Today, regular dictionaries include 120 to 150 classifiers; the 8822-word Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency () lists 81; and a 2009 list compiled by Gao Ming and Barbara Malt includes 126. The number of classifiers that are in everyday, informal use, however, may be lower: linguist Mary Erbaugh has claimed that about two dozen "core classifiers" account for most classifier use. As a whole, though, the classifier system is so complex that specialized classifier dictionaries have been published.

Count-classifiers and mass-classifiers

Within the set of nominal classifiers, linguists generally draw a distinction between "count-classifiers" and "mass-classifiers". True count-classifiers are used for naming or counting a single count noun,

Furthermore, count-classifiers cannot be used with mass nouns: just as an English speaker cannot ordinarily say *"five muds", a Chinese speaker cannot say

For such mass nouns, one must use mass-classifiers.

Mass-classifiers (true measure words) do not pick out inherent properties of an individual noun like count-classifiers do; rather, they lump nouns into countable units. Thus, mass-classifiers can generally be used with multiple types of nouns; for example, while the mass-classifier  (, box) can be used to count boxes of lightbulbs or of books

each of these nouns must use a different count-classifier when being counted by itself.

While count-classifiers have no direct English translation, mass-classifiers often do:

All languages, including English, have mass-classifiers, but count-classifiers are unique to certain "classifier languages", and are not a part of English grammar apart from a few exceptional cases such as head of livestock. which all languages must have in order to measure items; this category includes units such as kilometers, liters, or pounds (see the list). Like other classifiers, these can also stand without a noun. Units of currency behave similarly.

! with noun

! without noun

! measurement units

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! units of currency

Other proposed types of mass-classifiers include

"collective" mass-classifiers, which group things less precisely

"container" mass-classifiers which group things by containers they come in

The difference between count-classifiers and mass-classifiers can be described as one of quantifying versus categorizing: in other words, mass-classifiers create a unit by which to measure something (i.e. boxes, groups, chunks, pieces, etc.), whereas count-classifiers simply name an existing item. Most words can appear with both count-classifiers and mass-classifiers; for example, pizza can be described both using a count-classifier and using a mass-classifier.

In addition to these semantic differences, there are differences in the grammatical behaviors of count-classifiers and mass-classifiers; for example, mass-classifiers may be modified by a small set of adjectives, as in:

Whereas count-classifiers usually may not. For example, this is never said:

Instead the adjective must modify the noun:

Another difference is that count-classifiers may often be replaced by a "general" classifier (), gè with no apparent change in meaning, whereas mass-classifiers may not. Syntacticians Lisa Cheng and Rint Sybesma propose that count-classifiers and mass-classifiers have different underlying syntactic structures, with count-classifiers forming "classifier phrases", and mass-classifiers being a sort of relative clause that only looks like a classifier phrase. The distinction between count-classifiers and mass-classifiers is often unclear, however, and other linguists have suggested that count-classifiers and mass-classifiers may not be fundamentally different. They posit that "count-classifier" and "mass-classifier" are the extremes of a continuum, with most classifiers falling somewhere in between.

Verbal classifiers

There is a set of "verbal classifiers" used specifically for counting the number of times an action occurs, rather than counting a number of items; this set includes cì, / biàn, huí, and xià, which all roughly translate to "times". For example:

These words can also form compound classifiers with certain nouns, as in rén cì "person-time", which can be used to count (for example) visitors to a museum in a year (where visits by the same person on different occasions are counted separately).

Another type of verbal classifier indicates the tool or implement used to perform the action. An example is found in the sentence:

The word jiǎo, which usually serves as a simple noun meaning "foot", here functions as a verbal classifier reflecting the tool (namely the foot) used to perform the kicking action.

Relation to nouns

Different classifiers often correspond to different particular nouns. For example, books generally take the classifier  , flat objects take  () , animals take  () , machines take  , and large buildings and mountains take  . Within these categories are further subdivisions—while most animals take  () , domestic animals take  () , long and flexible animals take  () , and horses take  . Likewise, while long things that are flexible (such as ropes) often take  () , long things that are rigid (such as sticks) take  , unless they are also round (like pens or cigarettes), in which case in some dialects they take  . Classifiers also vary in how specific they are; some (such as   for flowers and other similarly clustered items) are generally only used with one type, whereas others (such as  ()  for long and flexible things, one-dimensional things, or abstract items like news reports) are much less restricted. Furthermore, there is not a one-to-one relationship between nouns and classifiers: the same noun may be paired with different classifiers in different situations. The specific factors that govern which classifiers are paired with which nouns have been a subject of debate among linguists.

Categories and prototypes

While mass-classifiers do not necessarily bear any semantic relationship to the noun with which they are used (e.g. box and book are not related in meaning, but one can still say "a box of books"), count-classifiers do.

The categorical, "classical" view of classifiers was that each classifier represents a category with a set of conditions; for example, the classifier  () tiáo would represent a category defined as all objects that meet the conditions of being long, thin, and one-dimensional—and nouns using that classifier must fit all the conditions with which the category is associated. Some common semantic categories into which count-classifiers have been claimed to organize nouns include the categories of shape (long, flat, or round), size (large or small), consistency (soft or hard), animacy (human, animal, or object), and function (tools, vehicles, machines, etc.).