Keeping It Classy: Sinitic Classifiers and Their History in Literature
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2022
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to chart the history of nominal classifiers in Sinitic (Chinese)
languages. The particular focus is the forms in which classifiers appear throughout the written
record, and to aid this analysis data was gathered from a corpus of literary works spanning from
the very earliest complete works of literature written in the 5th century BC to full-length
vernacular novels written in the 18th century AD. The study finds that classifier phrases
gradually began to overtake other methods of counting beginning around the 5th century AD, but
oddly count phrases that do not utilize classifiers persisted in the literature at least as far as 1740
AD, which should not have been possible at least in the spoken language. Two solutions are
presented to account for this co-occurrence of what should be complementarily distributed
structures. The first being a prosodic solution, as detailed by Feng (2012), and the second being
one that focuses instead on extra-linguistic aesthetic concerns that may have artificially
preserved syntactic structures that were seen as more “literary” even though they were no longer
found in the spoken language. Ultimately, the study is inconclusive as to which, if either, account
is better suited to explain the discrepancies observed in the data, but the importance of
considering extra-linguistic factors in particular is emphasized.