Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In Chinese, numerals and classifiers are in principle adjacent to each other, forming a prosodic unit. Apparent violation of Num-Cl adjacency is observed when a zero-level adjective modifies the classifier. Such violation is not observed when the adjectives are phrasal. The current study provides a comprehensive description and analysis of different conditions of Num-Cl Adjacency constraints in Mandarin. Specifically, this paper proposes that the Num-Cl adjacency effect is reducible to the numeral lowering at PF, which is motivated by the morphological dependency of numerals rather than a requirement on the linear relation between numerals and classifiers. This analysis accounts for all observations regarding word order between the numeral, the classifier, and the different types of adjectives in a unified way. In addition, it is shown that the numeral-lowering analysis is also applicable to complex numerals and can solve the problem of some approximant numerals.
Source: Language and Linguistics 語言暨語言學
Author: Chen Ran
Institutions: Southwest University, National Chengchi University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4407237730