Classifiers in English and Chinese A corpus-based contrastive study Richard Xiao [email protected]

Classifiersin English and Chinese

A corpus-based contrastive study

Richard [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

18/04/23 CLASS2008 - Canterbury 2

The corpora

• Two English corpora– Freiburg-LOB (FLOB)– BNCdemo

• Two Chinese corpora– LCMC– CallHome Mandarin Transcripts

• Covering a range of genres roughly comparable for the two languages

• POS tagged, providing a basis for the annotation of classifier use


Typical quantifying constructions

• In Chinese– Numeral + classifier + noun

• e.g. 三 (three) 本 (CL) 书 (book)• In English

– Count noun• Numeral + noun (e.g. three books)• Numeral + “partitive” + of + noun (e.g. a stack of

books)– Noncount noun

• Numeral + “partitive” + of + noun (e.g. two lumps of sugar)


Chinese as a classifier language

• A large inventory of classifiers– 500-600 commonly used classifiers

• 421 types in LCMC and CallHome

• Prevalent in Chinese– 2.48% of writing and 3.13% of speech

• Mandatory in Chinese– Omissions are exceptions rather than the

norm for classifier use


Chinese as a classifier language

• Grammatical status– Before classifiers were established a separate word

class, they were analyzed as a special group of nouns– Classifiers and nouns are so closely related that no

firm line can be drawn between the two out of context– In spite of the interwoven relationship, classifiers were

separated from nouns to become a word class of its own in Chinese in the 1950s


Classifiers in Chinese (Xiao 2006)


Does English have classifiers?

• A debatable issue• A subclass of nouns in current English grammar

– partitive nouns (Quirk et al 1985)– collective nouns, unit nouns, quantifying nouns, and

species nouns etc (Biber et al 1999)

• While the quantifying function of such nouns has been recognised, their status has rarely been systematically questioned (Brems 2003)


Does English have classifiers?

• Lyons (1977: 462)– “are very similar, both syntactically, and semantically”

• fifty head of cattle, three sheets of paper, that lump of iron

– “serve exactly the same function – that of individuation and enumeration – as do the classifiers in Tzeltal, Chinese and Burmese”

– “semantically relevant points”

• Allan (1977), Lyons (1977), and Lehrer (1986)– Classifiers in English: numeral + classifier + of + noun


Categories of classifiers in English• Allan (1977) and Lehrer’s (1986: 111) seven categories

of classifiers– unit counters (e.g. a piece of furniture)

• Unit classifiers– collective classifiers (e.g. a herd of animals)– varietal classifiers (e.g. all kinds of flowers)

• Species classifiers– arrangement classifiers (e.g. 3 stacks of books)– measure classifiers

• Exact measures (e.g. two pounds of potatoes)– Standardised measure classifiers

• Inexact measures (e.g. a bucket of water)– Container classifiers

– ? fractional classifiers (three quarters of the cake vs. half of the cake)

– ? number set classifiers (many hundreds of them vs. three hundred of them)


Types of classifiers in English• Two more types of classifiers

– Temporal classifiers• E.g. 200 hours of community service

– Verbal classifier times indicating the occurrences of an action or event

• E.g. I’ve seen it three times now.

• If their semantic parallels in Chinese are classifiers, then it is also reasonable to analyze them as classifiers in English– Eight semantic categories of classifiers in English

and Chinese


8 categories of classifiers

• Nominal classifiers: Quantifying nouns– Unit classifiers: count individual entities– Collective classifiers: provide a collective reference

for separate entities– Arrangement classifiers: also refer to a collection, but

focus on the constellation aspect (shape), i.e. how entities are arranged or grouped together

– Standardized measure classifiers: express exact measures of various kinds, in local or international units


8 categories of classifiers

• Nominal classifiers: Quantifying nouns– Container classifiers: denote types of containers,

which are borrowed temporarily to provide an inexact measure of mass or entities that are usually associated with such containers

– Species classifiers: denote the type of entities grouped together

• Verbal classifiers: quantify actions and events• Temporal classifiers: (exact or inexact) measure

time


Proportions of tokens

• In terms of tokens, unit classifiers are predominant in Chinese while container and collective classifiers are significantly more common in English– Unit classifiers are also the most common type in English, but

have a much lower normalized frequency (42 vs. 1,866 instances per 100,000 tokens)

010203040506070

Classifier type

Pro

po

rtio

n (

%)

English

Chinese


Numbers of types

• In terms of types, Chinese has a greater number of unit classifiers, standardised measure classifiers, arrangement classifiers and verbal classifiers whereas English uses more collective classifiers and container classifiers

020406080

100120140160180

Arrang

emen

t

Collec

tive

Conta

iner

Std m

easu

re

Specie

s

Tem

pora

lUnit

Verba

l

Classifier type

Nu

mb

er

of

typ

es

English

Chinese


Results of contrastive analysis

• Of the eight categories of classifiers, the most noticeable difference lies in unit classifiers– Their individuation is mandatory for all nouns in

Chinese but required only for noncount nouns in English

• Other types of classifiers are qualitatively more similar than different in the two languages– They have full lexical meanings and can find their

counterparts in other languages in spite of different terms used for them


Results of contrastive analysis• An interesting similarity is that a special group of nouns

temporarily borrowed as container classifiers in Chinese, which cannot take numerals other than 一 ‘ one’ (meaning 满 ‘ full’), are parallel to container classifiers ending with the suffix -ful in English– e.g. 一 (one) 肚子 (belly) 气 (anger) ‘full of pent-up

anger’; 一 (one) 屋子 (room) 人 (person) ‘a roomful of people’

– e.g. handful, armful, mouthful, roomful– These special container classifiers, which are more

descriptive than quantifying are otherwise ordinary nouns



• Standard measure terms, species classifiers, and temporal classifiers do not differ much in English and Chinese, irrespective of some variations in their frequencies of use in the two languages

• A common feature of arrangement classifiers and unit classifiers in Chinese and English is that they are largely motivated by the cognitive basis of shape– unit classifiers 条 , 张 and 块 in Chinese– arrangement classifiers bunch, pile and row in English



• Some classifiers in English and Chinese are also motivated pragmatically– Some English classifiers (e.g. gang, mob and pack)

usually refer to a group of people the speaker does not approve of

• Different from more neutral collective classifiers (e.g. crowd and group)

– In Chinese, some collective classifiers (e.g. 伙 ‘ crowd, gang’) and verbal classifiers (e.g. 通 ) are habitually negative in evaluation, whereas unit classifiers such as 位 can only be used for respectable people


Results of contrastive analysis• There is an important difference in the way

actions and events are quantified in the two languages– In Chinese, there are nine fully fledged verbal

classifiers and a large number of verbal classifiers borrowed on an ad hoc basis

– English uses the specialised verbal classifier times and adverbs once and twice to indicate the number of occurrences. In addition, English relies heavily upon light verb constructions composed of a light verb and a verbal action noun to approximate the quantifying function of borrowed verbal classifiers in Chinese

• e.g. have a look, give the car a push, fired two shots


Some general differences

• Different grammatical statuses– A separate word class in Chinese– A subclass of nouns in English

• Different scopes of use– Mandatory in Chinese– Only required for noncount nouns in English

• Different frequencies of use– 29 times as frequent in Chinese as in English


Syntactic differences

• English classifiers as a special group of nouns have singular and plural forms while their counterparts in Chinese do not

• The majority of monosyllabic classifiers in Chinese can be reduplicated to express a grammatical meaning of co-existence or repetition of entities or event whereas classifiers in English cannot



• The numeral 一 ‘ one’ in quantifying constructions can be omitted in Chinese if they function as objects, but quantifying determiners and numerals in English cannot– 写（一）封信 ‘ write a letter’

• Inverted quantifying constructions in the form of ‘noun + numeral + classifier’ are found in Chinese but not in English– 橄榄油 20 毫升，去壳鸡蛋一个 ‘ 20 ml of olive oil,

and one peeled egg’



• While classifiers do not regularly take a modifier, they have a considerably greater variety of modifiers in English than in Chinese– Largely classifier intensifiers in Chinese, emphasizing

the large / small quantity or amount (e.g. 大 ‘ big, large’, 小 ‘ small’, 整 ‘ whole’)

– Two major types of classifier modifiers in English: classifier intensifiers, and evaluative qualifiers relocated from the noun being quantified (e.g. a late-night cup of coffee)

• No such relocation occurs with classifier modifiers in Chinese


Conclusions• In spite of their different scopes and frequencies

of use, and some language-specific syntactic differences, classifiers in English and Chinese share many common features

• The differences in use of classifiers in the two languages are largely quantitative rather than qualitative – they are less different from each other than their different terms in current use would suggest

• In undertaking contrastive research, one must not be confused by the different terms used for the same phenomenon in the languages under consideration

Documents

Classifiers in English and Chinese A corpus-based contrastive study Richard Xiao [email protected]