- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax
- Some Notes on Comparative Syntax, with Special Reference to English and French
- On the Grammatical Basis of Language Development: A Case Study
- Comparative Syntax and Language Disorders
- Object Shift, Verb Movement, and Verb Reduplication
- Finiteness and Negation in Dravidian
- On Some Descriptive Generalizations in Romance
- Classifiers in Four Varieties of Chinese
- Morphology and Word Order in “Creolization” and Beyond
- The Slavic Languages
- The Scandinavian Languages
- Noun Class, Gender, and the Lexicon-Syntax-Morphology Interfaces: A Comparative Study of Niger-Congo and Romance Languages
- Agreement and Its Placement in Turkic Nonsubject Relative Clauses
- Quʼest-ce-que (<i>qu</i>)-<i>est-ce-que</i>?: A Case Study in Comparative Romance Interrogative Syntax
- Clitic Placement, Grammaticalization, and Reanalysis in Berber
- Clitic Placement in Western Iberian: A Minimalist View
- Comparative Athapaskan Syntax: Arguments and Projections
- Number Agreement Variation in Catalan Dialects
- Classifiers and DP Structure in Southeast Asia
- The Celtic Languages
- Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese
- Continental West-Germanic Languages
- Language Index
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the use of classifiers in four varieties of Chinese: Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. It analyzes the distribution and interpretation of the different forms of nominal expressions in these languages, as well the variation that they display in this regard. The articlew investigates the question of what parameters play a role and attempts to find deeper reasons for some of the systematic contrasts. It also discusses the correlations between form, interpretation, and distribution of three different types of nominal expressions in Mandarin, Min, Wu, and Cantonese.
Keywords: classifiers, Chinese languages, Mandarin, Wu, Min, Cantonese, nominal expressions, systematic contrasts
Lisa L.-S. Cheng is a Professor in the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Rint Sybesma, Leiden University, Netherlands
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax
- Some Notes on Comparative Syntax, with Special Reference to English and French
- On the Grammatical Basis of Language Development: A Case Study
- Comparative Syntax and Language Disorders
- Object Shift, Verb Movement, and Verb Reduplication
- Finiteness and Negation in Dravidian
- On Some Descriptive Generalizations in Romance
- Classifiers in Four Varieties of Chinese
- Morphology and Word Order in “Creolization” and Beyond
- The Slavic Languages
- The Scandinavian Languages
- Noun Class, Gender, and the Lexicon-Syntax-Morphology Interfaces: A Comparative Study of Niger-Congo and Romance Languages
- Agreement and Its Placement in Turkic Nonsubject Relative Clauses
- Quʼest-ce-que (<i>qu</i>)-<i>est-ce-que</i>?: A Case Study in Comparative Romance Interrogative Syntax
- Clitic Placement, Grammaticalization, and Reanalysis in Berber
- Clitic Placement in Western Iberian: A Minimalist View
- Comparative Athapaskan Syntax: Arguments and Projections
- Number Agreement Variation in Catalan Dialects
- Classifiers and DP Structure in Southeast Asia
- The Celtic Languages
- Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese
- Continental West-Germanic Languages
- Language Index
- Name Index
- Subject Index