Identifying true classifiers in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Lai, Wan Chun, 賴宛君
• Other Authors: Her, One Soon
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/56026788765460281447

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 100 === The discrepancy in the different inventories of Mandarin Chinese classifiers results from there being no identical and consentient tests to identify Mandarin Chinese classifiers. Thus, this thesis adopts four linguistic-based tests as norms to identify Mandarin Chinese classifiers and five Mandarin Chinese classifier categorizations proposed by representative studies (Chao 1968, Erbaugh 1986, Hu 1993, Huang et. al. 1997 and Malt and Gao 2009) as sources of data in Mandarin Chinese classifier categorizations. The data analysis focuses on offering true classifiers in Mandarin Chinese through re-classifying five Mandarin Chinese classifier categorizations on the basis of four linguistic-based tests, applying two mathematical methods and using a questionnaire experiment. Ultimately, true classifiers will be further classified on the basis of their semantic meanings from the Mandarin Daily Dictionary of Chinese Classifiers (Huang et. al.) to provide an explicit semantic categorization in a bottom-up form, rather than a traditional top-down one.