名詞或量詞：漢語量詞的非移位分析

Nouns or Classifiers: A Non-movement Analysis of Classifiers in Chinese

本文指出漢語個體量詞和非個體量詞雖然在語意屬性上有所差異，在詞類劃分上卻都是量詞，而不是經由名詞的移位而轉換過來的；相對的，英語中所謂的「度量詞」則仍屬名詞。這種非移位的語意屬性分析除了可以有系統的詮釋不同語言間的「持續詞」的可數性以及數詞與複數詞的共存限制，還可以避免 Cheng & Sybesma(1998,1999) 和Li (1999)等相關分析的語言事實和語言類型的問題。

It is shown in this paper that in Chinese sortal and mensural classifiers differ from one another in their semantic―not categorial―feature, both being listed as Cl in the lexicon and none undergoing the syntactic operation of N-to-Cl movement. In English, by contrast, the so-called measure words are categorized as N, and not Cl. This feature and non-movement analysis of classifiers may explain in a principled way the cross-linguistic variation in the mass-count property of duration expressions, on the one hand, and the cross-linguistic co-occurrence restriction between numerals and plural morphology, on the other. Such an account is also free of some empirical and typological problems raised for Cheng & Sybesma’s (1998, 1999) theory of Chinese classifiers and Li’s (1999) theory of Chinese plural morphology.