Classifiers in English and Chinese A corpus-based contrastive study

1
Classifiersin English and ChineseA corpus-based
contrastive study

• Richard Xiao
• Richard.Xiao_at_edgehill.ac.uk

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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

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Typical quantifying constructions

• In Chinese
• Numeral classifier noun
• e.g. ? (three) ? (CL) ? (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)

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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

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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

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Classifiers in Chinese (Xiao 2006)
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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)

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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

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Categories of classifiers in English

• Allan (1977) and Lehrers (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)

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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. Ive 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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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 ? one (meaning ? full),
  are parallel to container classifiers ending with
  the suffix -ful in English
• e.g. ? (one) ?? (belly) ? (anger) full of
  pent-up anger ? (one) ?? (room) ? (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

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Results of contrastive analysis

• 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 ?, ? and ? in Chinese
• arrangement classifiers bunch, pile and row in
  English

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Results of contrastive analysis

• 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. ?
  crowd, gang) and verbal classifiers (e.g. ?)
  are habitually negative in evaluation, whereas
  unit classifiers such as ? can only be used for
  respectable people

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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

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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

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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

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Syntactic differences

• The numeral ? one in quantifying constructions
  can be omitted in Chinese if they function as
  objects, but quantifying determiners and numerals
  in English cannot
• ?(?)?? write a letter
• Inverted quantifying constructions in the form of
  noun numeral classifier are found in
  Chinese but not in English
• ???20??,?????? 20 ml of olive oil, and one
  peeled egg

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Syntactic differences

• 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. ? big, large, ? small, ? 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

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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