The Selectional Relations and Constituency of Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Author: Peng, Yiwen
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2021
• Subjects: Linguistics
• ISBN: 9798515280864

This thesis delves into classifiers (shortened as CL in the following discussion) in Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on proposing a single constituent structure to account for the syntactic positions of different categories of classifiers. I examine Zhang’s (2013) split analysis, according to which the scope of delimitive adjectives indicates that different types of classifiers have distinct constituent structures and thus left- and right-branching structures are both required. In the split accounts, Mandarin classifiers that form a constituent with head nouns are represented with the right-branching structure, while those that form a constituent with numerals are represented with the left-branching structure. In this paper, I offer an account of feature checking among s-selectional features to explain the distinct scope relations between delimitive adjectives and different types of classifiers, and I argue for a consistent right-branching structure for the representation of all types of classifiers. Finally, the structure of Noun-Classifier compounds in Mandarin are discussed to argue that classifiers occur in two distinct projections, UnitP and ClP: they are initially base-generated in CL, and then move to Unit to license numerals, and this supports the unified right-branching analysis in which classifiers form a constituent with nouns first rather than with numerals.