Plural Marker -men and Numeral Classifiers: Convergence and Divergence

• Main Authors: Lo, Yi Chieh, 羅奕傑
• Other Authors: Her, One Soon
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21803506805494294921

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 華語文教學碩士學位學程 === 103 === Since Greenberg (1972), there have been many studies addressing the issue of the relationship between numeral classifiers (CL) and plural markers (PM) (Greenberg, 1972; Sanches and Slobin, 1973; Borer, 2005; Her, 2012). These scholars (henceforth CL-PM Convergence View) discovered that CL and PM tend not to co-occur in the same language, and even if they do co-occur, they are complementarily distributed within NP. Some linguists (Borer, 2005; Her, 2012) take this generalization further to propose that CL and PM in fact belong to the same category. However, when we look at Taiwan Mandarin (TM) data, a potential counterevidence can be found: [Num+CL+N-men], in which CL and –men, generally taken to be a plural suffix, co-occur within the same NP. In light of this, this study aims to take a realist look at TM –men, collecting relevant data from grammaticality judgment task and corpora so as to capture the behavior of –men. We then test CL-PM Convergence View against empirical data obtained in the study, showing that [Num+CL+N-men] does not constitute a counterexample to CL-PM Convergence View. The apparent interaction between CL and –men in TM can also be accounted for under our analysis of –men. Specifically, this study establishes the following facts for TM –men: (1) the use of –men is not restricted to human Ns; (2) N-men must be definite; (3) Proper N denotes ‘more than one Proper N’; (4) [¬1 qun N-men] is grammatical; (5) [Num+CL+N-men] is grammatical; (6) native speakers’ acceptability of [Num+CL+N-men] is in negative correlation with their English proficiency, and priming effects of English structure [Num+N-s] are observed on speakers with low English proficiency. Taking these findings into account, this study proposes that TM –men should be best analyzed as a collective plural marker, contra Iljic, (2001,2005) and 陳俊光’s (2009) “associative” analysis on the one hand, and Li (1999) and Hunag et al’s (2009) “additive” analysis on the other. Accordingly, we argue that –men as a collective does not constitute a counterexample to CL-PM Convergence View, citing two further pieces of evidence: Her et al’s (to appear) insight that “semantic plural” and “grammatical plural” should be distinguished and the proposal made there to revise CL-PM Convergence View, and the “clitic” analysis of TM –men proposed in this study. Finally, we show that the distinction between “semantic plural” and “grammatical plural” also nicely explains the synchronic and diachronic interaction between CL and –men in TM.