Chinese Classifier

Chinese Classifier

In the modern Chinese languages, words known as classifiers or measure words (simplified Chinese: 量词; traditional Chinese: 量詞; pinyin: liàngcí) are used along with numbers to define the quantity of a given object, or with demonstratives such as "this" and "that" to identify specific objects. Classifiers are bound morphemes: they do not have any meaning by themselves and are always used in conjunction with a noun or another content word. Whenever a noun is preceded by a number or a demonstrative, a classifier must come in between. The choice whether to use a number or demonstrative at all, however, is up to the speaker; classifiers may often be avoided by simply using a bare noun. Phrases consisting of a number, a classifier, and a noun, such as 一个人 (yí ge rén, one-CL person), are known as "classifier phrases". 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. Finally, in addition to these uses, classifiers may be used in variant ways: when placed after a noun rather than before it, or when repeated, a classifier signifies a plural or indefinite quantity.

Most nouns have one or more particular classifiers associated with them. For example, many flat objects such as tables, papers, beds, and benches use the classifier 张 (張) zhāng, whereas many long and thin objects use 条 (條) tiáo. The way speakers choose which classifiers to use—and thus, by extension, how nouns are categorized—has been the subject of debate. Some propose that classifier–noun pairings are based on innate semantic features of the noun (for example, all "long" nouns take a certain classifier because of their inherent longness), and others claim that they are motivated by analogy to more prototypical pairings (for example, "dictionary" takes the same classifier as the more common word "book"). In addition to these specific classifiers, there is a general classifier 个 (個), pronounced gè in Mandarin, that may often (but not always) 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. Finally, Chinese also has mass-classifiers, or words that are not specific to any one object; for example, the mass-classifier 盒 (hé, box) may be used with boxes of objects, such as lightbulbs or books, even though those nouns also have their own special classifiers. In all, Chinese has anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred classifiers, depending on how they are counted; there is also variation in which classifiers are paired to which nouns, with speakers of different dialects often using different classifiers for the same item.

Many languages close to Chinese 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 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 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, and their meanings were gradually bleached away until they could only be used as classifiers.