| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 90 === ABSTRACT
The Chinese classifier system has always been an intriguing and interesting topic under discussion. In this study, we focus on the classifier selection of Mandarin Chinese speakers. We discuss three potential factors underlying the Mandarin classifier selection─semantic relation between classifiers and the following nouns, the syntactic environment where classifiers occur, and physical traits of the target objects.
In the first part of the study, we specifically examine classifiers after numerals. The results indicate that when the semantic content of a particular classifier is close to the following noun, this classifier is more likely to be preserved. As the semantic relation between a noun and a classifier gets more distant, the classifier tends to be either neutralized to a general classifier ge or substituted to another specific classifier which has certain overlapping semantic feature with the original classifier.
The second part of this thesis deals with classifier selection after demonstratives. We compare the neutralization of classifiers after numerals (with the data we obtained in the first part of the study) and demonstratives. The result shows that classifiers occurring after demonstratives are neutralized more often than those after numerals, and the difference reaches statistic significance.
The last part of this research investigates the conceptual mechanism underlying classifier selection. With the change of physical traits of the same target objects, we expect subjects to react differently and choose different classifiers according to the most salient perceptual feature of the two pictures (of the same target object). However, the result is not as expected. Subjects seem not to be influenced by the change of shapes, sizes, etc., they nevertheless tend to choose the classifier in their lexicon that collocates with a particular noun most frequently. That is, collocation frequency seems to play a bigger role than conception in classifier selection.
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