What Counts in Mandarin Chinese: A Study of Individuation and Quantification

What Counts in Mandarin Chinese: A Study of Individuation and Quantification Pierina Cheung mpcheung@uwaterloo.ca Department of Psychology University of Waterloo Peggy Li David Barner pegs@wjh.harvard. edu Laboratory for Developmental Studies Harvard University barner@ucsd.edu Department of Psychology University of California, San Deigo classifiers in the context of mass interpretation confirms the claim that in the absence of classifiers, [noun] predicates in Chinese are interpreted as mass” (p. 108). Under this account, classifiers do not merely reflect the meaning provided by the noun, but actually supply units of individuation and quantification, just as English mass nouns require unitizers like “piece” to specify the unit. Several studies have provided evidence for the view that only count nouns in mass-count languages lexically specify units of individuation. In one study, using a word extension task, Lucy found that when presented with an entity (e.g., a cardboard box), and asked to judge which of two alternatives was more similar, English speakers preferred a shape-matched choice (e.g., a plastic box) whereas Yucatec Mayans divided their choices between the shape-matched choice and a substance-matched alternative (e.g, a piece of cardboard; see also Lucy & Gaskins, 2001). In a subsequent study, Imai and Gentner (1997) found a similar result in Japanese speakers who were more likely to extend novel words on the basis of substance than on the basis of object kind relative to English speakers. In more recent work, Huang and colleagues (Huang & Lee, 2009; Huang, 2009) used familiar words to examine noun semantics in Mandarin-speaking adults and children. Using a picture verification task, they found that Mandarin- speaking adults judged sentences containing a bare noun (yizi ‘chair’) as acceptable when these nouns were used to refer to either a whole object or just a piece of an object (e.g., yizi, or ‘chair’, was acceptable for a whole chair or half of a chair). However, when a sortal classifier was added to the noun (zhang yizi ‘a chair’), adults rejected pictures depicting object parts, while children continued to accept them. Based on this finding, they concluded that, first, learning sortal classifiers “initiates children into learning how individuals and non-individuals are encoded in the language” (Huang, 2009: 150), and second, nouns do not have individuated meanings independent of classifiers (see also Borer 2005). Thus, on their view, the combination of a classifier and noun specifies criteria for individuation. Huang and Lee’s interpretation of these findings is tempered, however, by the fact that many of the nouns they considered to be count in English were in fact syntactically flexible, and could be used as either count or mass in English. For example, the word ‘apple’ in English can refer to either individuals or nonindividuated stuff, depending on syntax (e.g., some apple vs. some apples). If we assume that noun meanings are the same cross-linguistically, Mandarin speakers might also be willing to accept whole and parts for the flexible nouns in a bare noun phrase because of the different meanings these nouns allow, just as English Abstract By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgment task, Study 1 found that Mandarin speakers interpret nouns like English speakers, regardless of their syntactic status as mass or count in English. Study 2 showed that Mandarin speakers quantified broken objects like English adults, again suggesting that Mandarin nouns specify criteria of individuation. Studies 3 and 4 together showed that classifiers are not typically required for individuation, except when the reference of nouns is semantically ambiguous (e.g., rock, string) and can denote either objects or substances. In sum, we argue that individuation can be specified lexically in classifier languages like Mandarin, and does not depend on classifier syntax. Keywords: individuation; quantification; nouns; classifiers; word learning; Mandarin; mass-count syntax. Introduction Languages differ in how they express reference to kinds of things. In English and other Indo-European languages, countable things like dogs and cups are typically referred to using count syntax (e.g., those are dogs), whereas uncountable entities like milk and sand are expressed as mass nouns (e.g., that is some milk). However, other languages, like Mandarin Chinese, make no such syntactic distinction. Instead, nouns in Mandarin, and related classifier languages like Japanese and Tsotsil Mayan, act much like mass nouns in English (Allan, 1980; Chierchia, 1998). Nouns cannot co-occur directly with numerals (*san bi ‘three pen’), but instead require classifiers (CLs) for counting (san CL-zhi bi ‘three pens’, is literally translated to ‘three CL-stick pen’). Based on this syntactic distinction, some researchers have argued that nouns in classifier languages may not specify individuation lexically. Instead, languages like Mandarin may rely on classifiers – i.e., words like “bit” and “piece” – to syntactically specify units of individuation, resulting in a fundamental difference in how nouns encode meaning cross-linguistically (e.g., Borer, 2005; Huang & Lee, 2009; Lucy, 1992). For example, according to Lucy (1992), in classifier languages such as Yucatec Mayan, all lexical nouns “are unspecified as to unit since they all require supplementary marking (i.e., numeral classifiers) in the context of numeral modification” (p. 73). Similarly, in her discussion of Mandarin Chinese, Borer (2005) argues that, “the need for a classifier projection to license counting vs. the absence of