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Humanness and Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese

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Language and Cognitive Science / 2016,2(1): 55−67 / 2016-08-26 833 892

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• Authors: Maximilian      Frankowsky*      and      Dan      Ke     
• Information:

  1.University of Bonn;
  2.University of Münster

• Keywords: anthropocentric continuum; Chinese; humanness; numeral classifiers
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• Abstract: Mandarin Chinese numeral classifiers receive considerable at-tention in linguistic research. The status of the general classifier 个 gè re-mains unresolved. Many linguists suggest that the use of 个 gè as a noun classifier is arbitrary. This view is challenged in the current study. Relying on the CCL-Corpus of Peking University and data from Google, we investigated which nouns for living beings are most likely classified by the general clas-sifier 个 gè. The results suggest that the use of the classifier 个 gè is motivated by an anthropocentric continuum as described by Köpcke and Zubin in the 1990s. We tested Köpcke and Zubin’s approach with Chinese native speakers. We examined 76 animal expressions to explore the semantic interdepen-dence of numeral classifiers and the nouns. Our study shows that nouns with the semantic feature [+ animate] are more likely to be classified by 个 gè if their denotatum is either very close to or very far located from the anthropo-centric center. In contrast animate nouns whose denotata are located at some intermediate distance from the anthropocentric center are less likely to be classified by 个 gè.
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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.35534/LCS201602003
• Cite: Maximilian Frankowsky, Dan Ke. Humanness and Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese［J］．Language and Cognitive Science，2016，2（1）：55−67．