Abstract
In Mandarin Chinese, reduplicative classifiers can be used to express plurality, which is closely related to the spatiality of nouns. This paper takes “一CCN” (short for the construction “One + Classifier + Classifier + Noun”) as an example to analyze the spatial presentation of “一CCN” and discusses its semantic consequence. Different from other quantificational expressions such as “Number + Classifier + Noun”, “一CCN” does not express a small quantity and “一CC” cannot fall in the scope of quantitative adverb and . By analyzing the contexts in which it can or cannot appear, and comparing it with (“many”), we conclude that the “many” meaning of “一CCN” is not its literal but inferential meaning.
(This study is supported by the project of “Research on the Lexical Semantic Knowledge Representation and Its Computing System within the Framework of Chinese Parataxis Grammar” (Project No. 18JJD740003), and “The Study of International Chinese Language Teaching Resources and Wisdom Education Platform Based on ‘Internet +’” (Project No.18ZDA295). We hereby express our sincere thanks.).
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Notes
- 1.
In [3], “targets” and “referents” are called as “primary objects” and “secondary objects” respectively.
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Sun, J., Yuan, Y. (2020). Spatiality and Its Semantic Consequence of the Quantitative Expression “一CCN” in Mandarin Chinese. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_1
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