This paper aims to introcuce the trend of classifier research in modern
times. It took a long time for Chinese classifiers to be accepted and labelled as
one of the Chinese grammatical catergories; The functions and properties of
English classifiers are similar to those of Chinese classifiers, but they have not
yet been named uniformly, nor have they entered into English grammatical
catergory. Findings show that most of the studies on English classifiers or the
contrastive study of English and Chinese classifiers compare their similarities
and differences at the linguistic level. There are few studies on the contrast of
Chinese and English classifiers from the perspective of cognition. It is of vital
importance to carry out the corpus-based comparative study of quantifiers
from the cognitive linguistics. In addition, there are few scholars who specialize
in the diachronic study of classifiers. However, diachronic language study is
not indispensable to classifiers. On the contrary, the answers to many research
questions about classifiers are implicitly included in diachronic linguistics.
Language is changing all the time, and language change is its essential attribute.
Therefore, the diachronic study of classifiers is quite necessary.