Phoronyms
BERKELEY I NSIGHTS IN LINGUISTICS AND SEMIOTICS Irmengard Rauch General Editor Vol. 68
PETER LANG
New York. • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Bern
Christopher I. Beckwith
Phoronyrns Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction
PETER LANG Hew York. • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Bern
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beckwith, Christopher
I.
Phoronyms: classifiers, class nouns, and the
pseudopartitive construction I Christopher I. Beck.wi th. p. em. -(Berkeley insights in linguistics and semiotics; vol. 68) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Classifiers (Linguistics). 2. Typology (Linguistics). 3. Grammar, Comparative and general-Morphology. 4. Grammar, Comparative and general-Syntax. I. Title. P299.C58B43
418-dc22
2007027980
ISBN 978-1·4331·0139·7 ISSH 0893-6935
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek., Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the "Deutsche Hationalbibliografie"; detailed biblio raphic data is available
g /
on the Internet at http:/ dnb.ddb.de/.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book. Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2007 Peter Lang Publishing, !Inc., Hew York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, Hew York.. HY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany
Contents
Preface
.....................................................................................................
vii
Acknowledgments .................................................................................... xi Transcription and Transliteration ......................................................... xiii Abbreviations ...........................................................................................xv Introduction ........................................................................................... xvii
1. THREE FRUIT BANANA The Canonical Classifier Phoronym
. ..
......... . .
. 1
.......... ...................... ..
2. A LOT OF DOG
The Pseudopartitive Construction ................................................... 38
3. A
POD OF WHALES
The Group Classifier
.........
.
..
.................
.........
.. . . ..
....
. . ..
.
................
...
67
4. THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
Classifier Languages and the Repeater ........................ .................... 94
5. ADDING APPLES AND ORANGES Functional Categories and Taxonomy
6. YOUR
.
.
.
............ ..... ............ ..
HONORABLE TEA
Classifying Qualifier Terms
7. WOLFPACKS AND
.
......
.
.
................ .......... ......
.
.....
.
...
111
. .......
:.128
......
BUSINESSWOMEN
Class Terms and Gender ............................................................... 140
8. A
BEVY OF BEAUTIES
Phoronyms and Cognition
....................
.
....
..
.....
.
..
................
.
.........
157
• CONTENTS •
VI
APPENDIX A Phoronym Pretenders
.
.....
169
.................. . . . . . . . . .................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
175
. . . . ..................... . . . . . . .........................
........
.
APPENDIXB The Mandarin Plural Suffix
.
APPENDIXC The Pseudopartitive in English Syntax ............................................ 177
APPENDIXD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .........................................
181
..................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .........
191
...... ..... .. .. ........ .. ...... . . . . .. .. . ..... . . . . . .... .. ......................................
207
....... .. . . . . .. ..... .... ...... .... .. ....... . .. .. . . . . . ... .. ....... ................................. .....
217
Typology and Classifiers
APPENDIXE Terminology References Index
Preface
T
his book is about the grammatical category that includes 1 SORTAL CLASSIFIERS such as
head and pack in ten head of cattle and a pack of wolves; MENSURAL CLASSIHERS {or 'measure words') such as pound and mug in a pound ofsugar and two mugs of beer; REPEATERS (sometimes called 'autoclassifiers') as in Japanese hako hito-hako (literally, box one-box) 'a box'; and other subtypes. The phrase in which they all occur is known in formal grammar as the PSEUDOPARTITIVE construction.2 Since linguiists have essentially overlooked this 'part of speech'
as a grammatical cate
gory, there is not even an accepted traditional term for it in any branch of linguistics, including either functional or formal typology. After much discussion with colleagues I have coined a new, neutral term for it, PHORONYM, chosen to suggest two of the salient characteristics of the morpheme in question: anaphoric usage grammatically and meta phoric extension semantically. In Appendix E I discuss PHORONYM and the other terms used in this book and in the literature on classifiers and the pseudopartitive. Since measures are thought to be a linguistic universal and classi fiers embody a type of noun categorization, which is also thought to
I.
I use the unqualified term 'classifier' in its traditional sense, which is still the normal usage in the literature (see the detailed discussion in Appendix E on Tenninology). It is approximately equivalent to the 'numeral classifier' of Aikhenvald (2000), who gives a worldwide survey of noun classification phenomena of many (though not all) kinds, and an extensive introductory bibliography; see my review (Beckwith 2003).
2.
It is referred to as a 'classifier phrase' by functional typology classifier special ists. See the full examination of the pseudopartitive in Chapter Two.
• PREFACE
VIII
•
be a linguistic universal, the phoronym category is one of the funda mental building-blocks of language and would seem therefore to be worth ser.ious study. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons it has been neglected almost completely.
I
noticed this problem in my earlier
work on classifiers and related phenomena, and attempted to solve it. Only much later, after having completed an earlier version of the pre sent book, did I discover the existence of a totally separate literature devoted to the same topic under the rubric of the PSEUDOPARTITIVE, and was then able to fully understand the magnitude of the problem. Although this literature belongs to the formal typology approach and I am not a formalist by training or inclination, I could not ignore such
an important body of work. I thoroughly revised my manuscript, add ing a full chapter on the pseudopartitive and further discussion related to it throughout the text. To a large extent the topics I cover i n this book are new ground. While I mainly discuss CLASSIFIER PHORONYMS and related mor phemes, territory staked out by functional typologists, I focus on prob lems little touched by them, and the basic conceptual framework in which I place them is the pseudopartitive construction, which has been treated exclusively by fonnal typologists and syntacticians. My pri mary interest here is in grammatical issues and other problems in the typological study of phoronyms-especially classifiers-and the lan guages in which they occur.
I also discuss CLASS NOUNS, focusing on CLASS TERMS, such as -man and -woman in the class nouns businessman and bus�nesswoman, and QUALIFIER TERMS, such as man- and girl- in the class nouns man child and girl-chi/d.3 It is sometimes possible to substitute a CLASS NOUN-a type of compound noun-for a pseudopartitive construction, as in English
a wo/fpack for a pack of wolves, or a clothespile pile of clothes, and both constituents of class nouns have been
for
a
com
pared to classifiers. In some languages, such as Hungarian and Ti betan, class nouns are used almost exclusively to form the equivalent of group classifier pseudopartitive constructions. Because of their structure and semantics, class nouns also reveal much of importance about the relationship between classifiers and gender. For these rea-
3.
On the terminological problems involving the class noun and its constituents see Appendix E.
•
sons
PREFACE •
IX
I discuss class nouns in some depth. Finally, semantic issues are
necessarily prominent in any study that deals with classifiers, so I dis cuss them too, primarily with regard to widespread misconceptions about their implications and relevance, but also in connection with the light that classiifier categories are believed to shed on cognition. During the fifteen or so years in which I have been working inter mittently on these topics, many studies have been published on differ ent aspects of classifiers, which are virtually the only type of phoro nym to have received significant scholarly attention. Much continues to be written on them from the functional typology approach, though relatively little has been published on the pseudopartitive construction until quite recently. In general, as discussed in the Introduction, I have tried to avoid duplicating this previous work. Instead, my motivation in writing was primarily to elucidate aspects of classifiers, other phoronyms, and class nouns that have been overlooked, to delve into problems that have not been solved in previous research, and to cor rect interpretations of the data in the literature, including my own ear lier publications. I have also aimed at the establishment of clearer cri teria for the identification and analysis of class.ifiers and class nouns of different types in languages not previously believed to have them. The idea of the classifier phoronym is still not well known among general linguists unfamiliar with Asian languages, and when known it is much more likely to be misunderstood than understood. With that not insignificant problem in mind, and realizing that nearly aH of my chosen topics are phenomena that have been overlooked, little studied, or in some cases studied but widely misinterpreted, I have attempted to discuss each topic as clearly as possible without relying on the as sumption that readers will already know all about it. In Chapter One I introduce PHORONYMS, focusing on the classifier subtype and problems seen in the literature on classifiers, through presentation of the much-cited but little-studied Mandarin Chinese system. In Chapter Two I discuss the PSEUDOPARTITIVE. Chapter Three covers GROUP CLASSIFEERS and other phoronyms in European languages. Chapter Four is about the largely ignored problem of the implications of the distribution, occurrence, and frequency of classifi ers. In it I also analyze REPEATERS, a frequently mentioned but little discussed phoronym subtype, the existence of which undermines the dominant theory of what classifiers are. Chapter Five shows that CLASSIFIER CATEGORIES per se are not recognized at the grammatical
X
•
PREFACE •
level, and that classifiers are essentially covert form class markers much like the overt form class markers of European gender languages. Chapter Six analyzes one component of CLASS NOUNS, the QUALIFIER TERM, based on the Tibetan system. Chapter Seven analyzes the other component of CLASS NOUNS, the CLASS TERM, and shows how Thai has developed obligatory overt GENDER-type concord within its classi fier and class noun system. Chapter Eight proposes a new model, tak ing into account research in both functional and formal typology, and discusses the theory that classifier categories are a reflection of prelin guistic or sublinguistic COGNITION. The appendices mostly provide further discussion of various topics that are touched on but are not dis cussed in detail in the body of the book. The References section in cludes only works I have actually cited. Ordinary source citations are not indexed. As far as I know this is the first monograph devoted specifically to phoronyms and the pseudopartitive construction in which they typi cally occur. It constitutes my own small attempt to contribute some thing to their recognition and study. Above all, my goal has not been to criticize others or create controversy, but rather to understand, illu minate, and solve problems, even when doing so entails abandoning or disproving my own earlier arguments or those of other scholars. As will be clear to readers, very many previously little-studied or over looked phenomena are mentioned, in quite a few cases suggesting the need for an in-depth study-for example, most aspects of the pseudo partitive, class nouns, complex partitives, classifier phoronyms in European languages, case marking in pseudopartitive and partitive constructions, and numerous other topics. Generally, I have hardly been able to do more than touch on them. Since this book represents to a great extent a foray into new terri tory, it is probable that I have sometimes gone astray and instead of having discovered something great, new, and important, I have simply made a mistake. I would I ike to ask colleagues who discover any mis takes to please Jet me know so I can correct them in any future edition. Finally, my hope is that I have at least discovered (or rediscov ered) new problems and new questions that others will find intriguing enough to investigate in future work.
Acknowledgments
I
am grateful to many people for reading and commenting on parts of this work, but most of all to my family. friends, and colleagues who served as informants, particularly H. Tapio Hokkanen (for Finnish), Krisadawan Hongladarom (for Thai), Khairullah Ismatullah (for Uzbek), Gisaburo N. Kiyose (for Japanese), Rumiko Masubuchi (for Japanese), and Natalia Murataeva (for Russian). Each spent many hours compiling materials for me and answeri.ng my sometimes pecu liar-sounding questions. Without their help this book could not have been written. I am further indebted to Ronald Langacker for inviting me to pre sent a paper on Japanese classifiers at the University of California, San Diego, from the discussion of which I learned much about child lan guage development; to Atsushi Iriki of the Laboratory for Symbolic Cognitive Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, in Sai tama, for inviting me to speak there on classifiers and gender and of fering valuable remarks on perception and cognition; and to Larry Moss of Indiana University, for kindly spending time to discuss termi nology with me. I also thank my wife Inna Murataeva, as well as Christian Bauer, Robert Botne, Yuri Brege), Pirkko Forsman-Svensson, Helmut Kras ser, John R. Krueger, Philip LeSourd, Jennifer Liu, Emanuel Mickel, Ulla Muranen, Mayumi Nakano, Gedun Rabsal, Kemal Silay. Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak, Michele Thompson, Federica Venturi, Yasuko Ito Watt, Huei-jen Yang, RudolfYanson, Megumi Yui, and everyone else who kindly answered my questions about their languages or who checked my data. Of course, I alone am responsible for the final prod uct, including any errors that may remain.
XII
•
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
•
In addition, I would like to thank the Indiana University Office of the Vice-Provost for Research and Dean Annie Lang of the College of Arts and Sciences for providing assistance for the publication of this book. Last but not least, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Ya suhiko Nagano and the staff of the National Museum of Ethnology (in Osaka), and Professor Tatsuo Nakami and the staff of the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), for their sponsorship of my research and their generous assistance in all respects during my sojourns as Visiting Professor of Linguistics (1996) and Visiting Research Fellow (2001 to 2002 and 2004 to 2005) respectively.
Transcription and Transliteration
F
or languages normally written in a Latin-based script, the stan dard spellings are used. For languages without an established modem writing system, transcriptions generally follow the sys tems used in the sources cited. For other languages that are not nor mally written in Latin-based scripts, the following systems are used, the main criteria being consistency, agreement with systems used in other literature, and simplicity. When phonetic precision is useful, a closer transcription is given in the customary square brackets.
Burmese The usual Bunnological transcription system (e.g., Becker 1986) is followed.
Japanese Although some linguists have adopted the government's system, it is unsuited to transcription of many features of the modem language (for example, there are now distinctions between [ti] and [tJi], (<J>a] and [ha] and other minimal pairs in the speech of many Japanese) and is need lessly opaque to those who are not linguists or do not already know Japanese. The major study of Japanese classifiers (Downing 1996) uses the Hepburn system. It is followed in this book also.
xiv
• TRANSCRIPTION AND TRANSLITERATION
•
Mandarin Mandarin. Chinese examples are cited in the pinyin transcription sys tem that is now standard among linguists working on the language. Tone sandhi is not marked.
Russian The customary transliteration system is followed.
Thai The system used in the dictionary of Haas (1964), which is also used by most linguists who work on Thai classifiers, is followed with minor modifications.
Tibetan There is no standard system of transcription for any form of Tibetan. My own system is used for Old Tibetan, Classical Tibetan, and the Lhasa dialect of New Tibetan.
Uzbek Although Uzbek is now increasingly written in other scripts, the mate rial collected on the language was largely transcribed in Uzbek Cyril lic script. The transcription used is therefore a retranscription of stan dard Tashkent Uzbek written in Cyrillic script.
Abbreviations
AAP ABL ACC ADJ ADV AGR ASP ATT CCL CL CLF CLN CLT COLL COM CONY COP CP CT D DAT DET ELAT EV FIN FLEX GCL GEN
attributive adjective prefix ablative accusative adjective adverbial agreement aspect marker attributive concordial class, concordial class-marker classifier classifier class noun class term collective comitative converbial copula classifier phrase class term determiner dative determiner elative case evidential finite flexion group classifier genitive
xvi HON HQT IMP INAN INDEF INT
lit. LOC
MChi MCL MP N NCL
NMan Nn NOM NP NUM NUMB
NUMP PART
PHOR PL POS PSP
'¥ 'liP Q QUAN QP
QT REP s SG SPEC TAX
UCL VP
•
ABBREVIATIONS •
honorific honorific qualifier term imperative inanimate indefinite interrogative literally locative Middle Chinese mensural classifier measure phrase noun noun class marker, noun classification New Mandarin noun nominative noun phrase numeral number numeral phrase partitive case phoronym phoronym plural possessive pseudopartitive case marker pseudopartitive, pseudopartitive phrase pseudopartitive phrase quantifier quantifier quantifier phrase qualifier term repeater specifier singular specification for number taxonomy, taxonomic unit classifier verb phrase
Introduction
C
lassifiers have received a great deal of attention, and the con struction in which they occur, the PSEUDOPARTITIVE, has also received some attention, but the pseudopartitive function term, or PHORONYM, 1 the common grammatical category to which classifi ers, 'measure words', repeaters, and some other forms belong, has not previously been clearly identified, described, or named. Moreover, discussion of classifiers and the pseudopartitive has remained totally separate: linguists of the functional typology approach have worked exclusively on classifiers, while those of the formal typology approach have worked on the pseudopartitive construction-the 'classifier phrase' of the functional typologists. Although CLASSIFIERS have actually long been known to some linguists as distinctive forms in certain languages, and became much more widely known with the publication of Berlin's (1968) study of classifiers in Tzeltal, the beginnings of the modem linguistic literature relating to PHORONYMS may conveniently be dated to 1977, the year in which the first influential articles by linguists of both approaches were published: by Allan from the functional typology approach, and by Selkirk from the formal typology approach.2 Unfortunately, the linguists of these two approaches have remained completely oblivious to the existence of each other's work down to the present, perhaps be cause of the different terminology used for the topics under study in their literature. In formal typology, the topic of research is the pseudo-
I.
2.
See the detailed discussion of these tenns in Appendix E o n Terminology. See further in Chapters One and Two respectively. On the two approaches see Shibatani and Bynon (1995a). Aikhenvald follows the functional typology approach.
(2000:
5) explicitly notes that she
xviii
•
INTRODUCTION
•
partitive construction, and little attention is paid to the pseudopartitive function term (or phoronym), which is usually treated as a common noun. In functional typology, the main topic of study is the classifier, a subtype of phoronym (the pseudopartitive function term), and the grammatical construction in which it occurs is usually known as the 'classi tier phrase'. There is however an important difference between the two approaches, in that formal typologists and formal linguists in general have not been very interested in the pseudopartitive, which has thus received scant attention from them. 3 By contrast, functional ty pologists have produced a massive literature on classifiers, most of it focusing on semantics almost to the exclusion of grammatical analy sis. This mutual ignorance4 has had unfortunate consequences for both approaches. Formal typologists have mostly been interested in developing a symbolic representation of the underlying structure of pseudopartitive constructions.5 Their work deals with expressions in many languages that have not been examined by functional typologists because the lat ter consider such languages not to have 'true' classifiers and thus to be of no interest for 'classifier studies'. The literature on the pseudoparti tive is therefore of particular importance for understanding how classi fiers and other phoronyms work in any language.
3.
There is a relatively extensive fonnal literature on the which is to be distinguished from the partitive
case of
partitive
construction,
Finnish and some other
languages. The Finnish partitive case is in fact generally used for the
partitive construction,
as well
as
pseudo
for many other things. For the terminology see
Appendix E; for discussion see Chapters Two and Three. 4.
Recent publications by functional typologists (e.g., Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Rijkhoff2002; Senft 2000) still make no reference whatsoever to the existence of the pseudopartitive literature. Even Aikhenvald (2000) says nothing about the fonnalliterature, though she quotes approvingly Lehrer's (1986) paper, which is couched in the tenninology of fonnal typology and pays considerable attention to the pseudopartitive, citing the major works by Selkirk (1977) and Jackendoff ( 1977). At the same time, recent fonnal studies of the pseudopartitive make no reference to the functional typology literature on classifiers, with some partial exceptions (Stavrou 2003; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 200I).
5.
Classifiers are almost never referred to as such by fonnalists. When they do use the tenn it is usually not understood in the same way that functional typologists and specialists in classifier languages understand it. Simpson (2005) writes on the fonnal syntax of classifier expressions, and discusses partitive constructions, but does not mention the pseudopartitive.
• I NTRODUCTION •
XIX
Most specialists working in the functional typology approach have done substantial descriptive work on a particular language that has been identified as having classifiers. These studies are in large part focused on empirical analysis of the data, and their conclusions are often based to a great extent on the linguist's own fieldwork (e.g., Lobel 2000; Aikhenvald 2000, 1998; Senft 2000a, 1996; Downing 1996; Craig 1977). According to this school, certain languages (e.g., Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Kilivila, Tzeltal, Uz bek) are 'classifier languages',6 while other languages (e.g., English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Russian) are not. Even though languages of the latter group may have some examples of what look like classifiers, they are widely believed not to be 'true' classifi ers because they do not collectively form a semantic noun classifica tion system within the language (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 15-116; Grine vald 2000, Craig 1994; Serzisko 1982; Allan 1977). Studies in this tradition also often, though not always, distinguish sharply between sortal unit classifiers ('true' classifiers) and mensural classifiers or 'measure words', sometimes also called 'measure terms' (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 14-120; Grinevald 2000: 58, Craig 1994; Beckwith 1998; Ser zisko 1982: 104; but see Senft 2000a). While formal typologists have established the basic grammatical structure of the pseudopartitive construction and have no trouble un derstanding the concept of the phoronym, virtually the only thing dealt with by most functional typologists working on this topic is the unit classifier. The indistinguishability in many languages of sortal classi fiers, mensural classifiers, and repeaters, among other forms. has re ceived some attention, as discussed below, but it remains controversial within the functional typology approach (Senft 2000a). It has been noted at least since Allan (I 977) that classifier catego ries, unlike grammatical gender, have analyzable internal structure and are far fr o m semantically empty. Some scholars have argued that clas sifiers not only classify things, their categories reveal something sig nificant about how the mind works (Craig 1986; Lakoff 1986,
6.
This term is misleading, but as there is no other convenient term for languages that have significant classifier systems, I have used it in this book. See, however, Appendix 0 and the discussion of the usual understanding of the dichotomy between classifier languages and others in Chapters Three and Four.
XX
•
INTRODUCTION
•
1987). Yet despite the convictions of Aikhenvald (2000) and other functional typologists, who cite massive quantities of data from a large number of languages in support of their views, the very existence of classifiers or classifier categories remains disputed. Lehman (1979, 1990), a Burmese specialist, has argued cogently that classifiers do not actually 'classify' anything, and it has been shown that most classifier categories are not recognized as such functionally in language, indicat ing that the classification per se is not grammaticized (Beckwith 1999b). Many classifier categories are virtually impossible to analyze logically, so their classifiers have accordingly been labelled as 'het erogeneous'; others are semantically empty (the so-called 'default classifiers'); and still others, generally known as 'repeaters', are sim ply copies of the noun that appear in the phoronym slot of the pseudo partitive construction. These semantic issues have generally not been addressed at all by formal typologists, who typically refer to the pseu dopartitive function term, or phoronym, as a noun. In fact, very little about classifiers is agreed on, especially regard ing their grammatical category and relationship to other morphemes that carry out the same function. As Senft (2000a: 17) says, "the ques tion of nominal classification raises a whole lot of other questions." This is a specialized study of topics that have not previously been analyzed in depth, or at all, in what may be called 'phoronym studies', the bifurcated field that subsumes 'classifier studies' and 'pseu dopartitive studies'. I focus on particular theories, issues, and prob lems in the study of the phoronym and the pseudopartitive, especially the classifier subtype of phoronym and phenomena related to classifi ers. I also <:over classifier or phoronym systems in languages that have not hitherto been noted to have them Because this book is concerned with phoronyms, I necessarily deal both with men sural classifiers or 'measure words', which are thought to be linguistic universals (Craig 1986; Greenberg 1 972), and with sortal classifiers, which embody noun classification-another linguis tic universal, or feature thought to be found in all languages (Grine vald and Seifart 2004). Accordingly, many areas of linguistics are touched on and it is important to state clearly what this book is not about, or at least what it does not attempt to do.
• INT RODUCTION •
XXI
To begin with, it is not a typological survey of all noun categoriza tion phenomena,7 or even all classifier phenomena, nor is it a survey of all languages that have noun categorization or all languages that have classifiers. It is also not an exhaustive survey of all types of phoro nyms and pseudopartitive constructions in all languages. Like much of the recent work on the pseudopartitive (e.g., Stavrou 2003; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001), as well as virtually all specialist work on classifiers (e.g., Craig 1986; Downing 1996; Aikhenvald 2000; Senft 2000) and on related topics such as gender (Unterbeck et
al. 2000; Corbett 1991; Miihlhausler and Harre 1990) and number
(Corbett 2000), this book is written in general linguistic language so as to be accessible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions. In other words, it is not written in a formal framework and generally does not deal with theoretical issues specific to formal syntax, semantics, or any of the other specialized subfields of linguistics that might be touched on, most of which are outside my area of expertise. Languages have been chosen for discussion on the basis of several criteria, the most important being my feeling that much cross linguistic analytical work has discussed individual languages other than a given author's own specialty rather superficially, and drawn far reaching conclusions based on insufficient analysis and sometimes erroneous data. As a result, types of classifiers have been overlooked or miscategorized and languages have been misclassified with respect to their particular systems, while many aspects of phoronyms in gen eral and the constructions in which they occur have remained poorly understood, or fully misunderstood. This is not intended as criticism of anyone; the fact is that no one could do much better. A certain amount of superficiality is simply an unavoidable result, a built-in drawback, of trying to cover as many different types and languages as possible in order to establish a general typology. Wide-ranging surveys such as that given by Downing (1996) in her study of classifiers,8 or Aikhen vald's (2000) treatment of noun classification in general, are necessary and useful. Without them, and the many valuable studies by other lin guists, this book could not have been written-and would not, per haps, have needed to be written.
7.
Aikhenvald (2000) claims to be comprehensive; see Beckwith (2003).
8.
See my review (Beckwith 1999a).
XXll
• INTRODUCTION •
My most important criterion in language selection, therefore, was enough personal familiarity with the languages chosen so that I could at least fairly confidently acquire and control new data from infor mants either at home or in the field, and could understand their phoro nyms and pseudopartitive constructions more deeply compared to other languages with which I have little or no experience and about which I cannot confidently judge the accuracy of claims made by lin guists who cite data from them. To my mind this criterion is of crucial importance for the kinds of problems I address in this book. Another reason for limiting my language coverage is that, as noted above, the mensural classifier, a subtype of phoronym, is considered to be a linguistic universal (Craig 1986: 5), and noun classification of which one type is embodied by the sortal classifier-has similarly been said to be an "omnipresent phenomenon" in "the languages of the world" (Grinevald and Seifart 2004: 244).9 It is obviously impossible to do an in-depth study of the phoronym, or anything else, by attempt ing to cover aU of the thousands of languages of the world. The languages thus chosen for closer study in this book are: Man darin Chinese, widely considered to be a-or the-canonical classifier language; English, the focus of most published research on the pseu dopartitive construction; Japanese, a language with a relatively well described classifier system, though its other phoronyms have largely been neglected; Thai, a language with an important class noun system and an extensive classifier system that is in part obligatorily concor dia), like gender systems; and Tibetan, which has an unusual class noun system in which, unlike the Thai system, the classifying element occurs in the qualifier term. In addition, some attention is also given to Finnish, Hungarian, and Russian, which have been said not to have classifiers (so their phoronyms have mostly been neglected ), to Uzbek, and in lesser measure to a number of other languages, including French, German, and Turkish. I should also note that some phenomena I give particular attention to undoubtedly are not uniquely found in the selected languages. I am sure that there are other languages that have similar phenomena, and they might even have been studied by lin-
9.
Aikhenvald (2000: I) says. similarly, "Almost all languages have some gram matical means for the linguistic categorization of nouns and nominals." As for the 'almost', the two putative exceptions I myself have investigated (Finnish and Mongolian) arc not exceptions.
•
INTRODUCT ION
•
xxiii
guists. But, perhaps due to the general lack of attention to most of the specific problems focused on in this book, virtually the only useful references on, for example, the pseudopartitive, or on class nouns, are those I have cited. That brings up the question of bibliographic coverage. As noted above, this book is not primarily about noun classification. It is about the phoronym, the most intensively studied subtype of which, the classifier, embodies a type of noun classification. Except for class noun constituents, which have been compared specifically to classifi ers, I do not cover other types of noun classification phenomena including noun class markers whether non-concordial (as in Jacaltec)10 or concordial (as in Swahili), the better-known varieties of concordial gender (as in Latin, Russian, and Arabic), verbal classification sys tems, or possessive or deictic classification systems-except insofar as they touch on particular points under discussion in this book, as gen der does in the last chapters. This does not mean I have not looked into those topics. In the early stages of my research on classifiers, I examined all known systems of noun classification, as well as lan guage representatives from all major world areas. However, in the process of writing the book I came to feel that my discussion of some topics-e.g., gender in Classical Arabic-was best left to specialists in gender systems, while in other cases, such as the many problems of the analysis of noun classification systems in African and American languages, I found I was not sufficiently interested in the problems or the languages. In short, unlike most previous writers on topics involv ing classifiers, I do not focus on the semantics of noun classification though I do treat semantic issues relevant to my discussion-and as a result I have given few or no references to literature on these topics. It should also be mentioned that I wrote both the draft and the major re vision of this book, and prepared it for publication, during one or an other of my stays in Japan. The vagaries of the library system there are my excuse, however feeble, for many of my odd choices of citations, and occasionally for some of the omissions. I also do not attempt to identify important features of classifiers by the method of mass comparison across hundreds of languages. Aik henvald (2000: 4-5) notes, "I have looked at every language on which
10. On the
tenn 'noun classifiers' for these markers see Appendix E.
xxiv
•
INTRODUCTION
•
I could find data and which has noun categorization devices," a total of "about 500 languages," which by her own admission are "no more than about one-tenth of all human languages." Nevertheless, despite her effort to be comprehensive, she omits some forms of noun classifi cation I cover in detail in this book. With the publication of her sur vey, it became unnecessary for me to cover the same ground. In fact, the literature on classifiers and noun categorization has be come so huge it is now beyond the control of any individual human scholar. As one, I neither intend nor pretend to attempt to survey or reference all previously published linguistic literature on classifiers in general, classifiers in individual languages, or languages in which classifiers are prominent features. The·same applies to the general lit erature on languages discussed in this book, most of which is at best only tangential to the topics I do cover (cf., similarly, Aikhenvald 2000: viii). For example, chapters One, Five, and Seven treat specific phenomena in Mandarin, Japanese, and Thai respectively. These chap ters are
not intended to be general surveys of all classifier phenomena
in Chinese, Japanese, and Thai and all the literature on them, which would require several volumes for each language. Although I discuss classifiers and related phenomena, I treat almost exclusively subjects involving them that have been overlooked or poorly understood, which means that little or nothing has been published on most of them. For these topics I have cited all previous literature I could discover. For example, there is no literature at all specifically on phoro nyms, under any name, because the category per se has not previously been recognized. Although I have cited most of the literature on the
pseudopartitive, it is on the whole not substantial in quantity, and
much of it is not relevant to the topics investigated in this book. Group classifiers have previously been treated mainly as a literary phenome non and either ignored in the classifier literature or explicitly claimed not to be classifiers, and then ignored. Repeaters have frequently been mentioned in passing, usually as a type of classifier, regardless of the illogicality of this characterization-Aikhenvald (2000: 104) claims, "In every language with repeaters these represent a subclass of a clas sifier; they are often used for otherwise 'non-classifiable' items." Un fortunately, to my knowledge there is still not a single article devoted to them, and the implications of their existence have not received any special attention. Similarly, the fact that most classifier categories are not recognized as such grammatically has tremendous implicat¥ons for
• INTRODUCTION •
XXV
the idea of the classifier and theories of linguistic cognition connected to it, but it has not, to my knowledge, been discussed by anyone else. And although the occurrence of concordia) agreement involving Thai class nouns and classifiers has been mentioned in passing by several writers, the fact that Thai actually has extensive obligatory gender concord in certain kinds of noun phrases has apparently been over looked and thus left unstudied. As for the languages treated in the topics I cover, English is far and away the most studied language in the world, receiving many times the attention given to any other language. Yet the only linguistic research paper devoted to classifiers in English that has ever been pub lished, to my knowledge, is Lehrer (1986). It is noted in recent work only by Aikhenvald, who claims (citing Lehrer) that "quantifier con structions in English three heads of cattle [sic, for three head of cat tle-CIB] are in fact a subtype of genitive constructions. This is the main reason why English is not a numeral classifier language" (Aik henvald 2000: 116). However, although Lehrer indeed concludes that English is not a 'classifier language', she actually does argue that Eng lish has classifiers, and makes a convincing case for their existence. It is also true that Lehrer represents English cl.assifiers as not belonging to a distinctive grammatical category, but in this she is not correct, as should have been clear from her own discussion of the pseudopartitive in her article. Although there is a small amount of publis'hed research on English pseudopartitive constructions, this literature is not specifically con cerned with phoronyms of any kind and usually does not mention them under any name. As for class nouns, there are no published stud ies devoted specifically to them. 11 There are indeed studies of English compound nouns, but they have other agendas. and simply do not rec ognize the category of class noun or anything like it. Similarly, Man darin Chinese, which is often considered to be the canonical classifier language, is spoken by more people than any other language, and is now intensively studied, but very little specialist work has been pub lished on its classifiers. Practically the same thing can be said for most
II. The term 'cl.ass-noun' occurs in earlier traditional English grammatical works, where it means essentially the same thing as the modem term 'count noun' (Kruisinga similar.
1 932,
II:
23
et seq.). Sweet's
(1900:
55 et seq.) earlier usage is
xxvi
•
INTRODUCTION
•
of the topics focused on in this book, whether because the languages examined are Jess well studied or because the topics under investiga tion in better-known languages have simply been overlooked. Finally, I have focused on ideas and problems in this book, not on the perennial debates of modem scholasticism, most of which I find much Jess interesting than medieval scholasticism. As is customary I give references in the text and bibliography to works that I have actu ally cited, but like all other published studies that deal with classifiers and related phenomena, thiis book is not intended to be or to contain a comprehensive annotated bibliography. Some years ago I supervised a professional bibliographic search of all published literature on classifi ers worldwide. It produced a bibliography significantly larger than that in Aikhenvald's (2000) book, even though it was restricted purely to classifiers in the strict sense--i.e., with few exceptions it did not in clude noun class markers, gender, and other forms of noun classifica tion that Aikhenvald refers to as 'classifiers'. Most unfortunately, the lone manuscript of this work was lost and I gave up the idea of pro ducing a comprehensive bibliography. A bibliographically-oriented work would however be a great contribution to the field and I encour age any reader who would like to have such a work to compile one. The topics I treat in this book belong to areas of investigation that are still relatively young and fast-growing. There may well be cases in which specialized work in branches of linguistics or disciplines con nected to linguistics-for example, psychology, neuroscience, compu tational linguistics, cognitive science, or further afield-which is di rectly relevant to the topics I cover has remained unknown to me and others working on them, as in the above-noted situation with the for mal and functional typology literature on the pseudopartitive and clas sifiers. Bringing any such overlooked literature to the attention of lin guists working on the topics covered in this book would also be a great service to the field.
• l • T H R E E
F R U I T
B A N A N A •
The Canonical Classifier Phoronym
This chapter introduces and analyzes the most extensively studied type of 1 PHORONYM, the CLASSIFIER, from the functional typology approach, taking as an example Mandarin Chinese, which is widely cited as a stereotypical classifier language (e.g., Bussmann 1996: 75). Most of the topics covered in functional typology studies of classifiers are critically examined, along with other topics that are not usually covered, such as the question of what nouns mean when they occur without a classifier or other phoronym.2
A
I though few explicit definitions have actually been given by
functional typologists for the classifier as a linguistic cate gory, it is generally considered to be a morpheme that marks units of a noun, classifies it via covert agreement sets, and is morpho syntactically bound to a numeral or determiner (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Senft 2000a; Craig 1994; Dixon 1986; Allan 1977)_l To restate the general definition of this •canonical' classifier-according to the current consensus among functional typologists-it is a bound port manteau morpheme that 'unitizes' a noun referent, marks it for NUM BER, and AGREES with it covertly in semantic category or class.4
I.
2.
I
have deliberately restricted my discussion in this chapter to the functional approach to classifiers, with much of which I disagree. However, for the sake of consistency throughout the book I usually refer to the 'classifier phrase' as the 'pseudopartitive construction'. For the formal approach, see Chapter Two. See the Preface and Appendix E for the terms PHORONYM and CLASSIFIER.
3.
Most descriptions of classific:rs-e.g., Aikhenvald's (2000: 98-124)-do not actually analyze their specifically grammatical functions in detail, ifat all.
4.
I do not agree with this analysis; cf. Appendix E. s.v. Classifier, and Chapter
Eight. For my use of the term AGREEMENT see Appendix E.
2
I
• T H R E E FRUIT
BANANA
•
Nearly all the specialized literature on classifiers to date has been written exclusively from the viewpoint that the only 'true' classifiers are those now widely called 'sortal' or 'sortal unit' classifi.ers, though other subtypes are usually mentioned in passing. Examples are typi cally given from East Asian, Southeast Asian, Austronesian, or Ameri can languages that have extensive classifier systems, perhaps the most frequently cited being Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Burmese, Kilivila, Tzeltal, and Jacaltec. Examples of actual English classifiers are usu ally ignored.5 Thus Lyons ( 1968: 288), writing before the beginning of the boom in classifier studies, says:
It is as if...in English ...the difference between 'lhree bananas' and 'three banana trees' would be made solely in the classifier-three fntit banana : three tree banana.
In a language without obligatory number marking, however, the only difference between three banana tree and three tree banana is the syntax. I f the number marking is ignored, English does have class nouns exactly like this-e.g., three kiwifruits : three kiwi trees.6 A decade later Lyons (1977: 464), after remarking on noun drop in classifier anapbora, says. "it is arguable that, in many instances, the classifier is the head, rather than the modifier, in the constructions in which it oc<:urs. The fact that this is so makes sortal classifiers rather like determ iners." This suggests that classifiers are simply obligatory qualifiers, or they are a kind of qualifier term or class term (q.v. Chap ters Six and Seven). But if classifiers do qualify their target nouns, why not simply use adjectives? Rijkhoff (2002: 133-145) actually proposes an implicational universal in which languages that have clas sifiers do not have a category of adjectives, and cites Mandarin, among other languages, as examples. However, in all languages dis cussed in this book, classifiers are relatable (and have been related) to
5.
This is not the case in the general linguistic literature, where examples of classifiers are sometimes taken from English without comment (e.g., Bussmann
6.
I.e.,
1996: 75). NUMERAL- QUALIFIER/CLASSIFIER- HEAD NOUN versus NUMERAL- HEAD
NOUN
-QUALIFIER/CLASSIFIER, which order is specifically disallowed in classifier constructions. English has forms such as a maple tree and a maple leaf, but not •a tree maple or •a leafmaple. Some speakers drop the plural marker in
the first example:
three kiwifntit.
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P· H ORONYM
•
3
nouns, not to adjectives, grammatically, semantically, and historically. The classifier language Thai (see Chapter Seven) has a distinct class of adjectives, and Mandarin actually does too.7 Another problem is the fact that in Mandarin and other classifier languages there is only one basic formal manifestation for both classi fiers as normally understood and for what are usually called 'meas ures'. In Mandarin, according to Chao
(1968), this grammatical cate
gory, which he calls 'measures' (intending the rough equivalent of 'phoronyms' in the terminology of this book), includes many subcate gories. The classifiers among them are now usually divided into two subtypes, after Lyons
(1977: 463), namely
MENSURA L CLASSIFIERS.
SORT AL CLASSIFIERS
and
zhang, the unit ke, the unit classifier for trees; tiao,
Sortal classifiers include
classifier for saliently flat things;
the unit classifier for some animals and for saliently extended non rigid things; zhi, the unit classifier for many animals and for saliently extended, rigid things, as in example
( 1 ), and so on.
Mensural classifi
ers include ping, for things that can be poured into or out of a bottle;
kuai,
for pieces of solid materials; bang 'pound', a measure of weight; bei, for things that can be poured or dumped into a cup, as in example (2), and many others, as in examples (88) to (97).8
(1)
yi-zhi
(2)
yi-bei
mdo 1 -UCL[ANIMAL; EXTENDED JUGID) Cat 'one cat' or 'a cat'
cha
1-MCL[cur) tea 'one cup of tea' or 'a cup of tea' While many classifier specialists have adopted this terminology (e.g., Aikhenvald 2000:
7.
1 14-115; Grinevald 2000), in most languages the
One of several distinguishing characteristics of Mandarin is that adjectives can
take (and often require) the intensifiers hen 'very' or tai 'too', but no verb, noun,
or classifier can. The received analysis of Mandarin adjectives as 'verbs' (for references see Rijkhoff 2002:
135) should be carefully reexamined with attention
to phrase marking and comparison with other languages that have a zero copula and some verb-like behavior in their adjectives.
8.
Chao (1968) gives an extensive list. See also the list in DeFrancis (2003: 1360-
1363). For a valuable discussion of classifiers that are actually used, in the context of child language acquisition, see Erbaugh (1986). O n the transcription conventions followed for Mandarin see T ranscription and Transliteration above.
4
1 • THREE FRUIT BANANA •
division of classifiers into two types is only marginally discernible, if it exists at all (Senft 2000a). The traditional native-speaker linguist or anthropological linguist interpretation of classifiers is that they are identical to measures or 'measure words' (e.g., Senft 2000a; Hamdamov 1983; Berlin 1968; Chao 1968), and together form one category. The conclusion generally drawn is that in such languages there is no essential difference between count nouns and mass nouns.9 Aikhenvald (2000: 249) says, "In numeral classifier languages, the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns is realized through classifiers and quantifiers, instead of overt number marking on nouns." This view goes back at least as far as Malinowski ( 1920). Nevertheless, most linguists who have done extensive specialized research on classifiers and measures agree that there are semantic differences, as well as differences in syntactic constraints,10 that distin guish sortal from mensural classifiers (Grinevald and Seifart 2004, Grinevald 2000, Craig 1986a; Aikhenvald 2000: 114-120; Beckwith I998; Downing I 996). Senft gives a typical definition of the two subtypes, using 'classifier' in the sense of 'sortal classifier', and 'quantifier' not in the normal sense (see Appendix E) but in the sense of 'mensural classifier' (Senft 2000a: 2 I -23 ): Classifiers classifY a noun inherently, i.e., they designate and specifY semantic features inherent to the nominal denotatum and divide the set of nouns ofa certain language into disjunct classes. Quantifiers classifY a noun temporarily, i.e. they can be combined with different nouns in a rather free way and designate a specific characteristic feature of a certain noun which is not inherent to it.
He adds that some linguists also distinguish "a category of classifier morphemes," which they call "repeaters," "echo classifiers," "identical classifiers," or "autoclassifiers," and notes that "these tenns charac terize the fact that nouns can be used as their own classifiers" (Senft 2000a: 22). Indeed, repeaters (q.v. Chapter Four) are a distinct type of phoronym found in many classifier languages. The consensus view of functional typologists on nouns in classi fier languages is that they are not as 'concrete' or 'unitized' as count
9.
This is not correct. See below and Chapters Two and Three.
I 0. In most analyses, however, the only feature treated is semantics.
• T H IE
CANONICAL CLASSIFIER
P HORONYM •
5
nouns in languages such as English or Russian, which have obligatory plural marking and are believed to allow 'direct' or 'immediate' quali fication of count nouns by numerals . 1 1 According to this view, it is therefore necessary to use the noun-like classifiers, which, like 'mea sure words', have the special ability to take direct qualification by numerals.
1 . 1 Sortal Unit Classifiers The artificial example of John Lyons quoted above is intended to illustrate the idea that in some languages even a count noun12 cannot be counted with a numeral alone, but requires another intermediary morpheme, together forming a three-constituent 'classifier phrase' or
PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION, as in example (1). l.n Mandarin
and most other classifier languages, this intermediary morpheme-a classifier or other phoronym-obligatorily occurs together with a numeral, determiner, or other specifier. 13 Thus in Mandarin, individual dogs may be counted with the sortal unit classifier zhf,'4 as in (3).
(3)
women miii/e siin-zhi
gou
bought three-UCL[ANIMAL; EXTEND£D RIGID) d og 'We bought three dogs J PL
.'
l I . This is one of the reasons some scholars consider classifier-like forms in English and Russian not to be classifiers (Craig 1994; Aikhenvald 2000: 1 1 5-116; Grinevald 2000). On this problem see the discussion of the 'defective noun theory' below and Chapters Three and Four; cf. Appendix E. 12. Since it is accepted that classifier classes 'refer' directly to real world things, their salient characteristics, and human interaction with them (but v. Chomsky 1993: 22-23), I use the term 'noun' rather than 'noun referent' (i.e., the real world things to which nouns refer) in this book unless further clarification is useful, following Aikhenvald (2000: vii) and Senft (2000a). This two-morpheme collocation or compound (numeral or determiner plus 13. classifier) is sometimes referred to as a 'phrase'. While this is correct for some languages such as English, Finnish, and Russian, it may not be correct for Japanese, Mandarin, and some other classifier languages, in which the classifier is essentially a bound-form. The problem calls for careful investigation. 14. Many Mandarin speakers classify dogs with tiao UCL[,.NIMt.L: EXTENDED r<-RJmoJ· The many different meanings ofzhi are historically distinct, and are still written with different characters, but they are identical in the spoken language.
6
I • THREE FRUIT BANANA •
However, a pseudopartitive construction in Mandarin and many other classifier languages actually consists of two parts: firstly a numeral or determiner (or both) with a classifier, and secondly the head noun, as in example (4).15 (4)
zhei san-ben
shu foichimg hiio
this three-UCL[vowME) book unusually good. 'These three books are very good.'
Consider the ill-formed examples in (5) through (7), which demon strate that in Mandarin classifiers are bound morphemes and cannot occur alone. (5)
*san shu hen-hiio three book AAP-good
(6)
*zhei san this
(7)
hen-hiio
three AAP-good
*ben
shu
hen-hiio
UCL[voo..uMEJ boo!< AAP-good
1.2 Classifiers and Nouns In Mandarin, nothing can be inserted between the numeral or determiner and the classifier. Not only must a classifier or other phoronym be preceded by a numeral or determiner (Li and Thompson 1981: 104 ), either a numeral or a determiner, or both, as in (8), must precede a classifier. Essentially the same is true for all languages with pseudopartitive constructions that I examined, though the syntax of the full pseudopartitive may differ, depending on the language. (8)
san-ben
shu
three-UCL[voLUME) bOOk
'three books'
That a classifier is itself not the same as a noun is shown by the fact that sortal unit classifiers cannot be used as free nouns or as proforms
I.
See Figure 2 below, and Appendix C.
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P H ORONYM
in Mandarin, as shown in
•
7
(9) and ( I 0). This is also true of Japanese
and many, though not all, other classifier languages.16
*ben
(9)
zai zhuozi shang
UCLivoLuME) LOC
table
'(?) is on t!he table.'
on
(I 0) *wo kim-le ben-/e I SG see-PF UCL[vOtuMEJ"PF • I saw a (?').' Examples
(9) and (1 0) would both be acceptable if a full noun, such as
benzi 'volume' or shU 'book' were substituted for ben, which is purely a classifier used with bound publications, as in ( 1 1) and (12).
( 1 1 ) benzi
zai zhuozi-shimg
volume at table-top 'The volume is on the table, '
(12)
wo
or
'The volumes are on the table.'
kan-/e shii-le
lSG read-PF book-PF ' I read the book,' or ' l read. ' There are a few rare exceptions to the rule. The only relatively common example in Mandarin of a classifier that is also a free noun is
t6u 'head' , which is a noun in (13), and a classifier in (14). The functions and meanings of the two occurrences are entirely different. The similarity is the result of diachronic change (classifier morphemes are mostly derived from nouns) and superficial. The classifier t6u UCL[LARGE LAND ANIMAL) also hardly can be equated semantically with the
noun
tou 'head'-which behaves as any ordinary noun, and means
'head' (the physical body part)-despite the fact that the two forms are homonymous and etymologically identical. 11 As a noun, the word refers to a specific part of the animal; as a classifier it refers to the whole animal.
( 13) san-ge
IOU
three-UCL(·AGR) head 'three heads'
16. II is said to be Jess true for Thai (DeLancey
I 986) and Vietnamese (Liibel
Repeaters (q.v. Chapter Four) do not occur in Mandarin.
17.
They are also written with the same Chinese character, Im.
2000).
8
I
T H R E E FRUIT BANANA •
•
niu
( 14) san-lou
three-UCLILARGE LAND AN1'4AL) COW/Ox/Catt(e 'three cows' or (lit.) 'three head of cattle'
Furthermore, as Chao (1968: 588-589) rightly notes, classifiers themselves-significantly including both sortal and mensural types cannot take the genitive-attributive phrasal suffix -de, unlike nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns. This prohibition against use of the genitive-attributive with a classifier is one of the defining charac teristics of a classifier in Mandarin. 18 Consider ( 15) through (21 ). ( 15)
•san-ben-de
shu
three-UCL[voLUMEtGEN book
( 16)
•san-lou-de
nizi
three- UCL[c.-.m.•rGEN cow/cattle ( 17)
san-lou
niu-de
lou
three-UC4cATTtE] cow/cattle-GEN head 'three cows' heads'
( 18) yi-1ao
or 'the heads of three head of cattle'
shii
One-GCL[sET; VEIUO.E) bOOk 'a (multi-volume) set of books' ( 19)
*yi-lao-de
shu
one-GCL[mJ-GEN book
(20) yi-biio
tang
One-MCL[PACKAGE) Candy
'a package of candy'
{21) *yi-biio-de
lang
one MC4•ACKAGEtGEN candy
Chao (1968: 588-589) gives a putative exception to the rule in an example using a different classifier for a set of books, in (22). (22) (?) yi-bu
shi-ben-de
shU
one-GCL[srr. vemn•J ten-UCL[vol.uME]-G EN book 'a work often volumes'
18.
This does not, however, apply to Japanese, where one of several synractic options for classifier expressions is precisely such a string, as in san satsu no hon three UCL(v<X.u•tEI GEN/ATI book 'three books'.
• THE
C A N O N I C A L CLASSIFIER P HORONYM
•
9
This example would seem to involve simple deletion of the redundant word shu 'book', which would appear in the full phrase, as in (23). (23) (?) yi-bu
shi-ben
shu-de
shu
1 GCL1srr. vEuoctEJ ten-UCL[vowt-teJ book-GEN book 'a work often volumes'
However, neither (22) nor (23) is actually acceptable. Classifiers are thus sharply distinguished from nouns in Mandarin. 19
1.3 Anaphora The noun expressed in a full pseudopartitive construction, as in (24), is omissible in anaphora, as shown in (25). The same is true for other phoronyms. (24) zhei-zhdng
zhuozi tebie
pii101iang
this-UCL[rLATJ table special pretty 'This table is especially beautiful.'
(25) wo bU xfhudn zhei-zhdng, kishi nei-zhdng
bucuo
lSG not like this-UCL[rLAT] but that-UCL[FLAT] nice ' I don't like this one (the above-mentioned table), but that one is nice.'
The anaphoric reference can be supplied by its real-life presence at the scene of the dialogue-example (26) could be said while walking into a bookstore and pointing to the books in question, without the word shu 'book' having previously been uttered. The same applies to (27), and to other classifier languages, such as Japanese and Thai. (26) zhei-sdn-ben
hen-hao
this-three-UCL[voLUME] AAP-good 'These three (books) are good.'
(27) sdn-ben
zheng hao
three-UCL(votUME] just good. 'Three is just right (referring to books that have already been men tioned or otherwise identified).'
The study of the discourse use of classifier anaphora is a significant sub-field within classifier studies in general. Among Asian languages
19. For group classifiers, see Chapter Three.
10
•
THREE FRUIT
BANANA
•
it has been studied at length by Downing ( 1 996: 159 et seq.) for Japanese and by Daley ( 1 996) for Vietnamese. In some languages classifiers may occur without nouns when the classifier and noun are in a I : I correspondence semantically,2° but this is rare, and does not seem to be possible at all in Mandarin. in which true classifier anaphora itself is relatively uncommon in general (Erbaugh 1986).
1 .4 Classifier and Numeral Drop Classifier drop can occur in Mandarin in informal speech. However, it is rare, it never occurs with numerals, and it is only allowable with the two main determiners, as shown in (28) and (29). (28)
na
shi ni-de-ma
that COP 2SG-GEN-INT 'Is that yours?' {29)
zhe shu-de
neirong
hen-kepa2 1
this book-GEN contents AAP-frightening 'This book is scary. '
The numeral yi 'one', when used in allegro speech in the sense of the indefinite singular number marker alan in English, is often dropped with the classifier -ge, as in (30). As a result, since -ge is an unstressed (and toneless) eli tic, it attaches to the verb qing 'ask'. This is a Mandarin example of the kind of deletion that commonly occurs in phoronym constructions cross-linguistically when the numeral 'one' is used as an indefinite unit marker,22 though often, as in Uzbek
20. Downing gives three examples of Japanese classifiers that can occur with no
accompanying nouns or antecedents, evidently because they are all in a I : I correspondence with their nouns: satsu UCL1oousovowMEJ 'volume', used only for books, magazines, etc., ri UCL(uuMAsl• used only for people (Downing 1996: 6263); and ma UCL(RooMJ• used only for rooms (Downing 1996: 160). Her other examples appear to be repeaters, q.v. Chapter Four. 21. While this example was preferred by informants, my original example, taken from a comic strip, was simply zhe shu hen-kepa 'this book is scary'. 22. In Thai, the indefinite is constructed by changing the order of constituents in the pseudopartitive construction from the normal N-NuM-PHOR order to N-PHOR NuM. This is only possible with the numeral 'one'. See Chapter Seven, where all the examples follow the usual 'numeral' order. The description of the order of
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER
P HORONYM
•
11
(Beckwith 1998), it is the classifier that is dropped rather than the numeral . (30) qing-ge
pengyou, jiu keyi yiqi
qu
ask-UCL[-AGR) friend then can together go 'Ask a friend, then you can go together.'
1.5 Phrase Expansion Unlike the close bond between the classifier (or other phoronym) and the numeral or determiner, that between the classifier and the noun is quite open. Adjectives and even clauses may be freely inserted between the classifier and the noun, as in (31) through (33).23 (31) Tii song wo yi-ba
hen-da-de
san
3SG give l SG one-UCL[nANDLE) APP-big-GEN/ATT umbrella 'He/she gave me a big umbrella.'
(32) Tii song wo yi-ba jeichang hao-kim-de san 3SG give 1 SG one-UCL[nANDLE) unusually good-1ook.at-GEN/AIT umbrella 'He/she gave me a very beautiful umbrella.' (Lit., 'He/she gave me an umbrella that is very good to look at.')
(33) Tii song WO yi-biio
jeichang hao-chi-de
tang
3SG give lSG one-MCL[PACKJIGE) unusually good-eat-GEN candy 'He/she gave me a package of delicious candy'. (Lit., 'He/she gave me a package of candy that is very good to eat.')
1.6 Classifier Variation Erbaugh ( 1 986: 400) has remarked on the variability in classifier usage observed among Mandarin speakers, and gives several examples, cited here in (34) through (37).24 constituents in Thai pseudopartitives is in error in Aikhenvald (2000:
I 05), but
the examples themselves are given in the correct order. 23.
See below on insertion of an adjective between
a
numeral or determiner and
some mensural classifiers. 24.
I have changed her numeral to san 'three'
and her glossing style to mine. Also, in
her examples the animal was a goat (yang means 'goat' or 'sheep'), but for the sake of better comparison with English
I
have translated it
as
'sheep'. All four
examples can be translated as 'three sheep' or 'three head of sheep'.
12
I • T H R E E FRUIT BANANA
(34) stin-zhi
•
yang
three-ucL1AN1MAL; EXTEI'ID£D RIGID) sheep/goat 'three sheep'
(35) stin-tou
yang
three-UCL[LAkGE LAND MAMMAL) sheep/goat 'three head of sheep'
(36) stin-tiao
yang
three-UCL[ANIMAL; EXTENDEDNOI'I-IUGID) sheep/goat 'three sheep' (37) stin-ge yang three-UCL[- cLASS) sheep/goat 'three sheep'
Each of these examples is slightly different. The everyday unmarked classifier for sheep and goats (and dogs) is zhf; t6u is only used for domestic cattle, usually in a pastoral context; tiao is perh aps a dialect usage, though my informants simply rejected it; and -ge does not clas sify its noun at all, it only specifies it for number. In Standard Manda rin, using -ge here is considered substandard, childish, or foreign. Becker (1986) has discussed variability in classifier selection in Burmese. Based on the similarity of this variation to that of adjective qualification, some scholars (e.g., Lehman 1990) have argued that classifiers do not really 'classify' their nouns. However, although there is some variability, which has been much emphasized in the lit erature, the fact is that variation in class agreement is simply not pos sible in most instances, as was recognized from the beginning of clas sifier studies, the whole point of which is agreement-the fixed rela tionship of different classifiers with particular nouns. See the general discussion of this problem in Chapter Four.
1 .7 Sortal and Mensural Classifiers In Mandarin, an ordinary full pseudopartitive construction with a sortal unit classifier, as in examples (38) and (39), is identical to one with a measure (mensural unit classifier) as shown in example (40), as well as to one with any other phoronym. (38) women moile stin-zhi
gou
bought three-UCL[ANIMAL; EXTE:oD£o IUGio) dog 'We bought three dogs: lPL
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASS I F I E R PHORONYM
•
13
(39) women yw i mai ni!i san-zhi gou 1 PL want buy that three-UCL [ANIMAL; ExnNnEo RIGID] dog 'We want to buy those three dogs.' (40) women miii/e san-bimg rm i 1 PL bought three-MCL[I"'UNoJ meat 'We bought three pounds of meat.'
This structural identity is equally true for ordinary 'default' pseudo partitives in Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, and all other classifier lan guages discussed in the literature, with rare exceptions that distinguish the phoronym subtypes from one another (see Chapter Eight), as noted by Senft (2000a). There are no significant formal distinctions in these languages between sortal and mensural classifiers. This can be seen not only in Mandarin, as in (4 1), but in English, as in (42). (41) wo yongle son-zhang zhf I SG used three-UC4rtAT] paper 'I used three sheets of paper.' (42) I used three sheet-s-of paper-0 1 SG used! three UCL[rtt.r]-NUMB[nrPSP pape:r-NUMB[-1 'I used three sheets of paper.' As noted above, semantically-oriented studies of classifiers have
shown that different sortal unit classifiers can agree with the same noun target depending on the configuration or perception of the real world referent. Yet this is exactly how mensural classifiers agree with their targets. For example, the Mandarin mensural classifier ping MCL[oonuJ (cf. the noun pingzi 'bottle') and the English equivalent bottle both require that the real world referents of their noun targets be something that can be poured into or out of a bottle, whatever its 'natural' or default configuration or lack thereof. The same principle applies to zhang and sheet-both require that their referents be saliently flat in form. Mensural and sortal phoronyms have thus been viewed as two subtypes of a single grammatical category (Lyons 1977) or better, as two poles on a continuum (Downing 1996: 1 3 ; Craig 1986: 5 ; Becker 197 5: 1 1 4).25 Since the English 'measure' phrase in (42) is semantically and functionally identical to the
25. This analysis of course ignores the existence of several other subtypes of
classifier that are non-configurational, notably the crucially important taxonomic subtype. See Chapters Five and Eight.
14
I • T H R E E FRUIT BANANA •
Mandarin example in (41 ), is the view that there is no difference be tween 'true' (sortal) classifiers and mensural classifiers (or measures) correct? 1.7.1 The Lumper View: Classifiers Are Classifiers
Arguments have been made against distinguishing sortal and mensural classifiers (Senft 2000a), due to the fact that they have the same basic grammatical structure. The phrase three sheets of paper, a pseudopartitive construction, is considered to be a 'measure' expression in traditional English grammar, sheet being the measure and its target, paper, a mass noun. It has also been so treated by most classifier specialists who have men tioned English in their treatments of classifier languages, even though the real-world referent actually exists only in discrete 'sheets', and the received view is that classifiers categorize real-world things directly. 1n the equivalent Mandarin expression, zhang is unquestionably a classifier. It is used obligatorily when counting not only paper but also other saliently flat things, including tables, as in (43), among many real-world objects represented by count nouns in English. (43) wo
maile
siin-zhiing
zhu6zi
ISG bought three-UCL[FLAT) table ' I bought three tables.'
A classifier in one language can thus be considered (rightly or wrongly) a measure in another. Linguists specializing in classifier studies have expended considerable effort to demonstrate a distinction between classifiers and measures in semantics, syntax, or usage (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 14-120; Beckwith 1998; Downing 1996; Tai and Wang 1991), but the essential formal identity of the typical 'classifier phrase' and 'measure phrase'-both of which are normal pseudoparti tive constructions-indicates that the function terms belong to one basic category (Lyons 1977; Senft 2000a): 26 the PHORONYM.
26. Linguists who are native speakers of 'classifier languages' tend to lump them together-shulimgci i 'count-measure-words' in Mandarin, numerativ 'numcra tive' in Uzbek, and so forth, as noted above.
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P H ORONYM
•
15
1 . 7.2 Th e Splitter View: Sortal and Mensural
Sortal and mensural classifiers are not only formally distinguished from nouns in Mandarin and most other classifier languages, there are semantic differences-and in a few cases formal differences-which mark them as two subtypes. It appears that in some languages most phoronyms do not classify their nouns-i.e., they do not have the feature [+CLASS]-while in other languages that have extensive classifier systems not all phoro nyms are classifiers. In order to solve the problem of what classifiers really are, and how they function, it is crucial to determine which morphemes are involved in noun classification and which are not. It is thus necessary to determine exactly which of the many morphemes that have been called classifiers behave as they are supposed to behave according to the model of a classifier described above. In the absence of formal morphological distinctions, many arguments have been made on the basis of highly theoretical semantic interpretations (e.g., Lakoff 1987; Silverstein 1986; Lehman 1979). Nevertheless, it is pos sible to formally distinguish some members of the subcategories. In Mandarin, one distinction is the fact that sortal unit classifiers occur with count nouns, which can often optionally take the [-AGR] sortal unit classifier -ge (a semantically empty 'default' phoronym that does not classify) instead of the noun's proper classifier (if there is one),27 while mensural unit classifiers occur with mass nouns, which cannot take -ge. Although this is only a distributional constraint, not a formal distinction, there is a specific syntactic rule that confirms the existence of a distinction between sortal classifiers for count nouns and some mensural classifiers for mass nouns. 1.7.3 Adjective Insertion
It is possible to insert either da 'big' or xiiio 'small' between the numeral and a mensural classifier, but not a sortal classifier. Consider the insertion . of da 'big' between the numeral and the mensural classifier in examples (44) through (46).
27. Doing so, however, is normally not correct usage for many nouns in Standard Mandarin.
16
1 • T H R E E F R U I T BANANA •
tang (44) Iii song wo yi-da-biio 3SG give I SG one-b ig-MCL[,..cKAGE) candy 'He/she gave me a big package of candy.'
(45) Ia
song wo yi-da-bao
3SG give lsG one-big-MCL[rAcKAGE) 'He/she gave me a big package of it.'
(46) gei
wo yi-da-kuai
tang
give I SG one-big-MCL[cuUNK) candy 'Give me a b ig piece of candy.'
By contrast. it is not possible to insert these adjectives between the numeral and a sortal unit classifier, as shown in (47) and (48).
siin (47) •ta song wo yi-da-ba 3SG give I SG one-b ig-UCL[uANDLE) umbrella 'He/she gave me a big umbrella'.
(48) •ta song wo yi-da-bii
3SG give ISG one-big-UCL(uM
Moreover, by no means do all mensural classifiers allow adjective insertion. Consider the sentences in (49) and (50), which show the same rule operating in Mandarin and in English. wo yi-bang shiitang give I SG one-MCL[rouNoJ granulated.sugar 'Give me a pound of sugar.'
(49) gei
(50)
•gei wo yi-da-Mng
shatang
give I SG one-big-MCL[Pou�
In fact, not only do most mensural classifiers not allow adjective insertion, it is possible only with the numeral yi 'one', it is not possible when determiners are included in the specifier, and in Mandarin it seems to be restricted to two adjectives, da 'big' and xiao 'little'. The subset of classifiers that does allow insertion consists of mensural classifiers signifying containers and pieces of solid material. Yet this is also not insertion of normal adjectives. In Mandarin, with rare exceptions, adjectives can not occur in bare monosyllabic stem form. If otherwise unqualified themselves, they take the adjective prefix hen- and the genitive-attributive suffix -de (Li and Thompson 1989: I 18-1 19; cf. Rijkhoff 2002: 135 and literature cited there) as
•
THE CANONICAL CLASSIFIER PHORONYM
•
17
shown i n ( 5 1 );28 they cannot appear with either marker when inserted, as shown in (52). When such adjectives do appear in their bare root form, they are, or behave like, compounding morphemes, and in many cases have already been lexicalized with their noun, as in xiaohaizi 'child' (xiao 'little' + haizi 'child'), da/6u 'building' (da 'big' + lou 'building'), and so on. (51) hen-da-de san APP-big-GEN/ATI umbrella 'a big umbrella' (52)
tang *yi-hen-da-(de-)biio ATI-)package candy one-APP-big-(GEN/
Although adjective insertion thus does not involve adjectives per se, the rule is significant. It indicates that classifiers which allow insertion of an adjectival morpheme retain a slight quasi-nominal status. At the same time, this is the exception that proves the rule: its very high level of constraint confirms the inviolability of the direct connection between a classifier and its numeral or determiner, and demonstrates that Mandarin sortal classifiers, and most mensural classifiers, are never even quasi-nominal.29
1.8 Sortal Classification and Mass Nouns Lyons notes that a sortal classifier specifies its noun referent "in terms of the kind of entity that it is," unlike a mensural classifier, which specifies its noun referent "in terms of quantity" (Lyons 1977: 463).
28. When reduplicated, adjectives cannot take hen-e.g., gtiogcio-de 'high' but not *hen-gtiogtio-de-suggesting that Mandarin simply has an obligatory disyllabic template for adjective stems. However, hen recovers its etymological sense of 'very' when stressed. This is thus an example of Mandarin syntactic .Processes being inseparable from phonological, morphological, and even etymological ones. When adjectives do appear in monosyllabic 'root' form they seem to be highly constrained, e.g., wo goo, nr Iii lsG high 2sa short 'I (am) tall, you (are) short' occurs, but wo gao alone means 'I (am) taller'. The idea that there are no morphosyntactically identifiable adjectives in Mandarin is clearly incorrect.
29. The formal distinction seen between nouns and classifiers in Mandarin is not as sharp in classifier languages that have repeaters, such as Thai, Burmese, and Japanese. See Chapter Four.
I • T H R E E FRUIT BANANA •
18
This distinction appears to be supported by a frequently noted cross linguistic phenomenon which occurs in the specification of mass nouns. In English, number marking itself is devoid of classification, but when mass nouns are specified without a mensural classifier they are interpreted by default as count nouns with the meaning 'a kind of, or 'an order of' (as in a restaurant), referring to a known measured quantity, such as 'a glass of, 'a bottle of, etc. For example, in contrast to a usual mensural classifier expression, such as two mugs of beer, the simple phrase two beers means either 'two orders of beer (as in a tavern)' or 'two kinds (e.g., lager, porter, lite) of beer' or 'two brands of beer'. Essentially the same thing happens in Uzbek, for example, uc howuc suw three handful water 'three handfuls of water' versus uc-ta suw three-PHORr- CLASSJ water 'three waters (orders of water in a restaurant, kinds of mineral water, etc.)' (Beckwith 1998: 135). This phenomenon does not occur with sortal classifiers, but that is because what they do is precisely to mark the "kind" of entity referred to by the target noun. In Mandarin, mass nouns are defined by their typical inability to take the sortal unit [-cLASS] classifier -ge. However, it is possible to use this classifier with a few mass nouns, signifying that the mass noun is an already understood unit, as in example (53). (53) san-ge
pijiu
three-UCL1_ AGR) beer 'three beers'
Unlike English or Uzbek, the Mandarin example in (53) means only 'three orders of beer' or the like. To express 'three kinds of beer' it is necessary to use the hyperphoronym zhong 'kind', as in (54).30 (54) san-zhang
PIJIU
three-PHORt- AGR) beer 'three kinds of beer'
1.9 Classifiers and Automeasures Aikhenvald (2000: 1 1 5) distinguishes between "numeral classifiers, especially those of the mensural type,31 and quantifiers (sometimes
30. See § 1 . 1 4 for further discussion ofhyperphoronyms like zh6ng.
•
THE CANONICAL CLASSIFIER PHORONYM
•
19
called 'measure words')." The intended distinction is not clear i n her presentation, since among her "quantifier" examples she includes not only the adjectives much and many (quantifiers in normal linguistic parlance) as well as English head (in the examplefive head of cattle) and Russian go/ova 'head' (in the exact equivalent pjat' golov skota 'five head of cattle'), both of which are undoubtedly true sortal unit classifiers according to any set of criteria currently in use for defining classifiers, but are in any case certainly neither quantifiers (in the sense of much and many) nor 'measure wordls'.32 Although mensural and sortal unit classifiers are morphemes that belong to the same basic category, the phoronym, in many languages it is not a free form. In Mandarin, for example, it does not occur outside of the pseudo partitive construction and is a constituent with the obligatory numeral or determiner in that construction. Regardless of their morphosyntactic status, however, all such constructions-thus including all 'classifier phrases'-obligatorily have a default minimum of three basic components or constituents: specifier (determiner, quantifier, and/or other form, depending on language-specific rules), phoronym, and noun. There is a strict grammatical difference between phoronyms of any kind, including mensural unit classifiers, which must either explicitly or anaphorically qualify explicit noun targets, on the one hand, and AUTOMEASURES on the other. Automeasures, such as Mandarin titin 'day' in san tian three day 'three days', do not occur in tripartite pseudopartitive constructions and cannot qualify noun targets. If one wishes to say three cups in Mandarin, referring to the cup as a thing in its own right rather than as a container for something else, one must use the noun beizi 'cup' and a classifier, as in (55). (55) stin-ge beizi three-UCL[- CLASS) CUp 'three cups'.
Automeasures are a distinct category in Mandarin and most of the other languages discussed in this book. Despite frequent attempts to treat them as classifiers, they are not phoronyms at all, and the phrases Her sole example of a mensural classifier is given incorrectly in her text. Korean han, which she says is a mensl!lral classifier for rice wine, is the numeral 'one' (Sohn I 999: 94). The mensural classifier in question is mal. Both forms are identified correctly in the glosses to her example (Aikhenvald 2000: I I 5). 32. See further in Chapters Two and Three.
31.
20
1 • T H R E E FRUIT BANANA
•
in which they occur are unrelated to the pseudopartitive. See Appendix A for a brief discussion.
1.10 Classifiers and Nouns: The Defective Noun Theory One of the most widespread beliefs about classifier languages is that in them-unlike, for example, English-'bare' unqualified nouns are abstract, vague, or collective, so they need classifiers to make them concrete, clear, or discrete. Following Greenberg, Denny ( 1986) and others suggest that classifiers perform the related functions of marking a definite individual, quantity, etc. out of the set of all possible occur rences of this vague abstractness-the 'mere concept' (Bisang 1999; Hundius and Kolver 1983), 'collectivity' (Greenberg 1978; cf. Denny 1986), 'generic reference' (Senft 2000a), 'concept' or 'conceptual label' (Hundius and Kolver 1983), or •mass' (Aikhenvald 2000: 3 1 8) that is normally represented by the unspecified, bare head noun in classifier languages.n Senft (2000a: 27) says, "Classifiers individuate nouns," echoing Lyons (1 977: 462). Another view argues that the classifier or measure is the head of the pseudopartitive construction because the target or controller noun can often be omitted (Lehman 1990: 92; Lyons 1977: 464). The defective noun theory has therefore had great repercussions for the development of classifier studies. Although discussions of classifiers tend to give the impression that they are obligatory in all situations in Mandarin, this is by no means the case. Studies of oral corpora have shown that classifiers actually occur with surprisingly low frequency in Mandarin (Erbaugh 1986) and Japanese (Downing 1996).34 In most situations classifiers are unnecessary and simply do not occur, because unless a Mandarin noun happens to be qualified by a numeral or determiner, no classifier is-or can be-used. Consider the sentence in (56). Adding a classi fier, as in (57), results in substantial change in meaning.
33. RijkhofT (2002: 46-56, especially 55 n. 39) argues solidly in favor of the defec tive noun theory, despite some very careful hedging. 34. See Chnpter Four.
•
THE CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P H O RONYM
•
21
(56) gou bu jii mle dog not seen 'The dog's gone', or 'The dogs are gone.' (57) yi-zhi g6u bu jiimle one-UC L[.-.NIMAL) dog not seen 'One dog is gone', or •A dog's gone.'
In other cases, depending on the context, use or omiSSIOn of a classifier does not significantly alter the sense, as in the sentence in (58) and the variant in (59). (58) haohao-de yi-bu jiiiotache; rang tti sheng xiu duo kixi nice-AIT I UC4VI1ncLE) bicycle let 3SG birth rust much pitiful 'Such a nice bicycle---it's a shame to let it get rusty.' (59) htiohiio-dejiiiotache; rang tti sheng xiu duo kexi nice-AIT bicycle let 3SG birth rust much pitiful 'Such a nice bicycle---it's a shame to let it get rusty.'
Omission of the pseudopartitive construction in (59) eliminates the explicit feature of specification by the numeral yf- 'one', but in the context-a mother pointing to her child's bicycle (no other bicycles were owned or present)-it was absolutely clear that only the particular bicycle under discussion could have been meant.35 Use of the classifier in this instance, though grammatically and semantically unnecessary, emphasizes the importance ofthe bicycle. Discourse studies have shown that classifiers are often used for this purpose, as well as to clarify a topic when it is first mentioned. "Special classifiers typically marked first mention of a new item. . . Once reference is established, subsequent mentions take the general classifier or constructions where no classifier is requ.ired" (Er baugh 1986: 408). This accounts for the much-remarked frequency of occurrence of a classifier at the first mention of an important character or object in a text. Although it has often been said that this is done to highlight the importance of the character or object, it appears likely that it is a necessity.
35. In isolation, the phrase htioluio-de jiiiotache nice-GENIATT bicycle 'nice
bicycle(s)' is unspecified; without a phoronym phrase or the third person singular pronoun Ia it would be unclear if one or more bicycles were being discussed. In these sentences, hciohtiode implies 'nothing wrong (with it), still works fine', etc.
22
I • THREE FRUIT BANANA •
Consider (60), the beginning of a Japanese folk tale that includes use of the human classifier ri (Downing 1996: 199). (60)
Mukashi-mukashi soko ni hito-ri no long.ago-long.ago there LOC one-UCL[uutotAN) ATI ryoshi ga arimashita. fisherman NOM existed 'Long, long ago, there was a fisherman who lived there.'
It is necessary to specify the noun here, otherwise it would be unclear if the narrator was telling a story about one fisherman or about two, several, or many fishermen. This is no different than English, as shown by the gloss, where it is necessary to specify the noun fisher man for the very same reason. In English, number is normally marked by -sl-es, the suffixed phrasal clitic for plurals, or by alan, the prefixed phrasal clitic for singular, rather than by a phoronym. But in no case can either Japanese ryoshi or English fisherman be interpreted as vague or abstract. As seen in examples (56) and (57), if a classifierl6 is absent when a noun is mentioned, it will normally be understood as a defined noun and may be specified by context or pragmatic knowledge. To illustrate what happens in the absence of such context or knowledge, consider a situation where a new employee comes into a Chinese-speaking office for the first time and says the sentence in (61) to the other workers, whom she has never seen before. (61) shu zai mili? book at where 'Where is the book?' or 'Where are the books?'
The office workers would most likely reply to her as in example (62). (62) shenme shu? what book 'What book?' or What books?' '
In neither (61) nor (62) is the noun shu 'book' understood as an 'abstract' or vague 'concept' such as '[BOOK]', "bookness", etc., as R.ijkhoff (2002: 144) and others have argued. The question in (61)
36. Or a construction such as wo-de ISG-GEN 'my', q.v. § 1.12.
• T H E CANONICAL CLASS I FI E R P H ORONYM
•
23
cannot even mean 'Where are there books?'37 I f the office workers would know a specific referent no matter who asked (for example, if there was only one book, one set of books, or one shelf of books in the entire office), the sentence would be understood as either 'Where is the book?' or 'Where are the books?' Without a specifier the noun is unmarked for number, but that is the only thing vague about it. The difference between English and Mandarin here is clearly grammatical. I n this kind of sentence English. unlike Mandarin, does not allow a noun to occur without a specifier (and of course English requires number agreement and an explicit verb as well). In other cases, as in (63) and (64), where a noun is incorporated into the verb, English does allow a count noun to occur sans determiner without converting it to a mass noun. In such cases it is fully as vague with respect to number as the Mandarin examples in (65) and (66). (63) I'm going house-hunting. (64) I'm going grocery-shopping (65) wo qu zhao fangzi I SG go find house 'I'm going to look for a house/the house/houses/the houses' (66) wo qu miii cai ISG go buy vegetables/food/the vegetables/some vegetables 'I'm going grocery-shopping'
In this kind of construction the English noun could even be less concrete and bounded than the Mandarin, but there still is no question that it refers to discrete buildings, not the concept [HOUSE) or 'houseness' or anything ofthe kind.38 Erbaugh's ( 1 986) discourse analysis shows that use of an unclas sified noun instead of a pronoun to maintain the topic in discourse in Mandarin is not only possible but so frequent it actually far outnum bers occurrences of classified nouns. Yet classifiers may be omitted
37. This would be zai nali you shu? at where exist book 'Where are there books?' or
'Where is there a book?' 38.
The same thing applies to Japanese, e.g., han o kai ni iku book ACC buy OAT go 'I'm going to buy a book/books/the book(s),' or 'I'm going book-buying.' As another example of count/mass non-marking, consider meat and plant in the sentence: Ths i dinosaur was a meat-eater; that one was a plant-eater.
24
I • THREE FRUIT BANANA
•
even in isolated statements with no context at all, as in examples (67) and (68), where the unclassified count noun shu 'book(s)' is normally understood specifically as a plural, 'books'. (67) shii hen-hiio book AAP-good 'Books are good.' (Or, in context, 'The books are good.') (68) wo xihutin shii. I like book 'I like books.'
In example (68) shu is indefinite; the sentence cannot mean *'I like the book' or 'I like the books'. But it is also unspecified, so it cannot mean 'I like a book', which in English is specified for singular number. In order to overtly express number in Mandarin it is necessary to use a numeral and/or a determiner, plus a phoronym. By contrast, the sentence in (67) can be either definite or indefinite, but nevertheless cannot be understood as specified for singular number, *'A book is good.' In most analyses fully specified English nouns-e.g., a cat, cats are compared with unspecified Mandarin, Japanese, etc. nouns.39 But unqualified concrete count nouns in English-when still 'count' se mantically, and still free nouns-are never both indefinite and un specified except in citation form, as in the gloss to the sentence in ex ample (69), where the subject mao 'cat' of the Mandarin sentence has no classifier for the same reason. (69) mao shi wo erzi zui
xfhutin-de zi
cat COP I SG son most like-GEN word ' "Cat" is my son's favorite word.'
In none of the above classifier language examples are the unqualified count nouns abstract, generic, collective, mass, or vague. They are unspecified for number, but they are unquestionably concrete, clearly delimited count nouns. Concreteness and similar semantic attributes of nouns are inherent and lexically assigned; they have nothing to do with whether or not the nouns are governed by classifiers. It is neces sary to reject the defective noun theory. Nouns in classifier languages are no less vivid, concrete, and well-delimited than are English nouns.
39. See the discussion of this problem in Appendix E.
•
THE CANONICAL CLASSI FIER PHORONYM
•
25
The defective noun theory is based on a false comparison between forms in one language that are unspecified for number and forms in another language that are specified for number.
1 . 1 1 Classifiers and Quantifiers It is obvious and non-controversial that demonstratives, which can occur as the first possible constituent of a Mandarin pseudopartitive construction, belong to a category distinct from that of numerals and the other constituents of the full pseudopartitive. As discussed in the Introduction, however, some functional typologists have not carefully distinguished between the two categories, producing considerable con fusion about 'quantifiers' and •classifiers' in the literature . Numerals and classifiers belong to distinct morphosyntactic catego ries. The classifier is a subtype of phoronym, but the numeral is a sub type of QUANTIFIER, a category that also includes a few other words, such as English some and many, not all of which correspond to quanti fiers in other languages. For example, Mandarin duo 'much, many' is a quantifier, as shown in examples (70) and (71 ), but xie 'some, sev eral, plurality' is a non-classifYing plural phoronym for count nouns, as shown in (72) and (73). (70) hen-duo cha AAP-much/many tea 'much tea' or 'a lot of tea' Jiiiotache (71) hen-duo AAP-much/many bicycle 'many bicycles' or 'a lot of bicycles' (72)
*yi-xie
cha
OOe·UCL[+coUNT. +PL] tea
(73) yz-xze
jiiiotache
one-UCL[+coUNT. +PL) bicycle 'some bicycles'
1 . 1 2 The Genitive,attributive and Noun Definiteness An alternative means of defining a noun without specifying it for
number is to qualify it with a noun or pronoun plus the genitive-
26
I
•
THREE FRUIT BANANA •
attributive suffix -de, as in (74) and (75). As shown in (76), a classifier cannot immediately follow such a qualifier, but a genitive-attributive qualifier can precede a pseudopartitive construction, as in (77). (74) w6-de shi1 zai neili I SG-GEN book at there
'My book is over there.' (75) zhang xiansheng-de cha zai neili Zhang mi ster-GEN tea at there
'Mr. Zhang's tea is over there.' (76)
shti zai neili *wo-de ben I SG-GEN UCL[vowMF} book at there.
(77) wo-de nei san-ben shu zai neili I SG-GEN that three-UCL[voLuMF.) book at there 'Those three books of mine (which were mentioned) are there'.
1.13 Classifiers and the Count/Mass Continuum There has been a general failure to distinguish between count and mass in isQJated lexical citation and in NPs (Joosten 2003: 167-1 68),40 which is aggravated by the failure to differentiate between number specificati.on and the count-mass distinction.41 It is important to note that classifiers themselves are assigned either to count nouns or to mass nouns, but count and mass is not determined by the classifier. In Mandarin. nouns are lexically count or mass; a phoronym assigned to count nouns cannot be used with a mass noun, and vice versa. One can say, for example, yi bang shatang one MCL[POuNoJ granulated.sugar 'a pound of sugar' (or 'one pound of sugar'; similarly below), but not *yi bang jiiiotache one MCL(POuNoJ bicycle *a pound of bicycle', and conversely yi bzi jiiiotache one UCL(vEHJcLE) bicycle 'one bicycle', but not *yi bit shcitang, and usually not <*)yige shtitang 'one sugar'.42 For
40.
Joosten is however to a certain extent guilty of the same thing himself, as he cites nouns in some instances with number markers and in others without.
4 1 . Cf. Appendix E. The usual distinction betw een 'count' and 'mass' is itself controversial (Joosten 2003: I 59).
42. The English gloss of this expression in the sense of 'one packet of sugar' could also be correct-though the Mandarin usage with -ge is marked-but in order to express the meaning 'one kind of sugar' the hyperphoronym zh6ng 'kind' must
•
T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P H O RONYM
•
27
mass nouns it is necessary to use a mensural classifier or other appropriate phoronym, as shown in example
(78) gei
wo
yi-bao
(78).
shtitmg i
give I SG one-MCL[PAcKAGE) granulated.sugar 'Give me a packet of sugar.'
1 . 1 3 . 1 Mensural Classifiers
and
Count/Mass
Despite the implications of the term, 'measuring' per se is not actually what is done by most mensural classifiers. Consider yi-kuai tie one MCL[cHuNK] iron 'a chunk of iron' and other similar cases involving solid
mass nouns, as well as container examples such as yi-ping niunai one milk
MCL1oom.eJ
'a
bottle
of
milk',
yf-wan ji m
one-MCL[aowl)
cooked.rice 'a bowl of rice', and so on. It has often been suggested that what may be called
'true'
mensural classifiers, or measures
strictly speaking-for example, Mandarin
bcmg
'pound' and English
ton-categorize nouns on an ad-hoc basis (Aikhenvald
1 17;
Craig
1 994).
2000: 1 15-
The claim is that theoretically a noun for anything,
no matter what its composition or original status as count or mass (or animate, inanimate, feminine, masculine, round-shaped, flat-shaped, etc.) can be qualified by a mensural classifier, and therefore such phoronyms "impose a limit on the referent with respect to which they are used" (Downing
1996: 1 7).
That is, they do not mark or refer to
the noun's implicit class per se, and so they are not "true classifiers" (Erbaugh
1986: 402; cf. Yau 1988; Downing 1996: 12; Aikhenvald 2000: 1 1 5-1 1 6). The Chontal Maya sortal classifier -pe, which is used
for "houses, swamps, hats, gourds, turtles, days, pieces of advice, and
stories" is,
despite its "default" or "unmarked" semantic status,
distinct from measures, because "while a pound of sand and a pound of feathers have their absolute weight (and little else) in common, a of house and
a -pe of turtle do
not" (Downing
-jJe
1996: 12).43
The fact is that mensural classifiers such as bang 'pound' really do measure their noun target, and "can be used to weigh iron, sand, apples, cotton, etc., which take different classifiers" (Tai and Wang
1990: 38),
e.g.,
yi-li shozi
one-UCL[sMALL PARTICLE) sand 'a grain of sand',
be used; see below. Cf. '(a) water' in the restaurant sense of 'an order of water', which is also possible in Mandarin.
43. Sec, however, Chapter Five.
28
I • THREE FRUIT BANANA
•
yf-ge pinguo one-UCL t-
•
'
•
.
1.13.2 Mensural Classifiers and Measuring Mensural classifiers also indicate in some way the consistency or form in which (or the means by which) the noun is counted, so they do involve a kind of classification. As Becker (1975), Lehman ( 1 979, 1990), Senft (2000a) and others have argued, there is no formal line between sortal and mensural classifiers. Nouns, however, are mostly lexically assigned to count or mass, in Mandarin as well as in English, although a few words, such as those for 'chicken' and 'fish', do not seem to have a default setting in either language. Therefore, the crucial difference is evidently not in the classifier but in the noun. There are indeed minor constraints that distinguish some types of phoronyms from others, such as the possibility of limited adjective-morpheme insertion with a few mensural classifiers in Mandarin (and in English). Nevertheless, it is clear that phoronyms are one category and the subtypes, including different types of classifier, can be seen as a continuum running from count to mass (cf. Aikhenvald 2000: 433), parallel to the nouns they refer to. This continuum, shown in Figure I , runs from strict count nouns to strict mass nouns (Becker 1975). mass (water) � count/mass (chicken) =;. count (bicycle) Figure 1. The nominal count-mass continuum
1.13.3 The Sortality of Mensural Classifiers
Although it is widely believed that 'sortal' classifiers categorize nouns based on the configuration of their referents, this is only partly correct; the great majority of classifiers in the better-known systems actually belong to the heterogeneous type (Downing 1996). Moreover, many mensural classifiers appear to be selected according to configuration
• T H E CANONICAL CLASSIFIER PHORONYM •
29
too. The semantic shape-characteristics of the mensural classifiers chunk, piece, slice, etc., are applicable to many (but far from all) nouns, whether count or mass; the same is true of container measures such as bottle, cup, truckload, and so on. This is because phoronyms which refer to mass nouns such as bread, water, or steel normally must agree in some sense with salient semantic features of their target noun referents. This is the same as with 'true' sortal classifiers, which also are required to agree covertly with their nouns, usually according to salient physical real-world characteristics or taxonomy, but also by non-transparent lexical assignment. This requirement of agreement actually applies even more stringently to mass nouns than it does to count nouns, indicating that mensural classifiers, like sortal classifiers, also implicitly class nouns into sets according to semantic criteria. For example, it is possible to use lump with butter (e.g., Give me a lump of butter), coal, sugar, iron, and wood, but not with silk (e.g., *Give me a lump ofsilk) or other saliently flat things and also not with beer or other saliently liquid things, not to speak of evanescent things like air. Similarly, it is possible to use sheet with paper (e.g., Give me a sheet ofpaper), steel, plywood, and even ice and water, but not with beer (e.g., *Give me a sheet of beer), sugar, butter, and so on. Con tainer and weight measures can be used for anything pourable, from water and milk to molten iron, but while one can say yi-kuai tie one MCL[cHuNK) iron 'a piece of iron' one cannot say *yi-kuai shui one MCL[cHuNKI water *'a piece of water' , despite the fact that we can say *yi-kuai bing one- MCL1cHVNKI ice 'a piece of ice'. It is also possible to say a slice of bread or a slice of cheese, but not *a slice ofpeas, or *a slice of milk, or *a slice of oxygen. There are countless other exam ples, for every mensural classifier. It thus appears that mensural classifiers are, simply, sortal too, though they sort mainly on the basis of consistency (Becker 1 975), unlike 'true' sortal classifiers.44
44. Some attempts have been made to distinguish different types of mensural classifiers (Stavrou 2003: 345-348; Chierchia 1998. cited in Stavrou 2003: 346).
30
I • THREE FRUIT BANANA •
1.14 Hyperphoronyms The distinction between count and mass can be completely lost (or not distinguished) in pseudopartitive constructions, but Mandarin must use a special kind of phoronym, usually zhOng 'kind' or lei 'kind, category ', to express 'a water' in the sense of 'a kind of water'. Chao ( 1 968: 597) includes zhOng among his 'group measures' (i.e., group classifiers)-most of which are actually QUASIPHORONYMS (q.v. Appendix A).4s The Cantonese equivalent of this phoronym,junl, is considered by Killingley (1983) to be a 'generic classifier'. However, although it is certainly a phoronym, the word by definition does not indicate class. It and its synonyms are neither sortal nor mensural, or else they are both. Compare the example in (79). chezi (79) san-zhang three-PHOR(. Ac•J vehicle 'three types of vehicles'
This type of phoronym is similar to -ge in that both are [-cLASS], but
zhang is [-cOUNT, -MASS] and can accordingly be used with any
Mandarin noun, whether count or mass.46 This is parallel to the use of kind in English, as shown by the glosses to (80) and (81 ). (80) nl xfhuan na-yi-zhOng shu 2SG like which-one-PHOR[-AGR) book 'What kind ofbook(s) do you like?'
(81) fa
mai/e son-zhtJng JIU 3SG bought three-PHOR[-ACR] liquor ' He/she bought three kinds of liquor ' .
A few other phoronyms of this type exist in Mandarin and in English. Their neutrality vis-a-vis classification of any kind, including the
45.
In a
footnote he argues,
"
. . . it may seem
out of place to put measures with
meanings like 'type, quality' under group measures of things. However, things belonging to a group usually have
some property in common, so much so that it
is possible in formal logic to turn around and define 'property' simply as membership in a class" (Chao
46.
Since
lion
1968: 597).
in the sense 'day' is an AUTOMEASURE (q.v. Appendix
A),
not a
rizi 'day' is used with the hyperphoronym zhang to express the idea of a 'kind' of day, as in nei zhong rizi hln-ttioyon that kind day AAP-annoying 'Days like that are annoying', or '1 hate days like that.' phoronyrn, the synonym
• T H E C A N O N I C A L C L A S S I F I E R P H O RONYM •
31
count-mass distinction, is due to their taxonomically high ranking. Mandarin zhang and its synonym lei, like English kind and category, are the most highly ranked of all phoronyms taxonomically. Unlike most phoronyms, they refer directly to 'the category of category', which is ranked higher than the division into count and mass, and in fact subsumes everything, by definition. This subtype of phoronym may be called the HYPERPHORONYM. Other examples include English lot, in a lot of, which has become an idiom meaning 'much/many'.
1.15 Non-classifying 'Classifiers' In Standard Mandarin, the assigned classifiers are obligatory with many nouns when they are specified. However, it is theoretically possible to use no sortal unit classifiers at all other than -ge in Mandarin. This is because ge which Chao ( 1968), Erbaugh ( 1986), and others consider to be a 'general classifier', is the default classifier for count nouns that is used when no classifier exists or is known, or when the noun in question is unclassifiable or not clearly or immediately identifiable.47 It is a classifier by form and function, but it does not classify anything, so I usually mark it 'UCL[-<ussJ '. It is virtually identical to the phoronym suffix -Ia in Uzbek.48 One could indeed speak Mandarin without using any unit classifi ers other than -ge, and still be understood. However, in most, if not all, Mandarin communities speaking in this way marks one as having bor derline competence in the language-i.e., as a foreigner, an infant, a mentally handicapped speaker, etc.49 It does indeed happen that a Standard Mandarin speaker may use -ge as the 'default' classifier in-
,
47. Unlike most classifier languages, Mandarin has no repeaters (q.v. Chapter Four). 48. It should be properly described simply as a [-cLASS] phoronym. Erbaugh consistently refers to -ge as "the general classifier," and unambiguously treats it as an ordinary classifier throughout her study, but at the end of her diachronic discussion she refers to it as "the classifier for human beings and unclassified objects" (Erbaugh 1986: 430). She also inexplicably omits it from all of her tables. For Uzbek, see Chapter Three. 49. I have heard it remarked that in some substandard Mandarin speech styles only -ge is used, presumably except for mensural and other non-classifying phoronym expressions. This may or may not be true, but I personally have never heard any native Chinese speak Mandarin this way.
32
I
•
THREE FRUIT BANANA
•
stead of the correct classifier in some cases, as in the examples cited by Erbaugh ( 1986: 408). However, these particular cases involved un certainty, unfamiliarity, and an extremely artificial situation. When no uncertainty is present, mature speakers more or less always use the obligatory 'correct' classifiers.
1.16 Classifier Phoronym Features and Functions Based on the evidence presented above, it is clear that cross linguistically not three but only two grammatical features are involved in classifiers alone: marking a noun target for number (though classifiers do not actually mark nouns as count or mass, the setting for which is lexical), whether by units or as a plurality (Allan 1977: 294); and categorizing, or covert semantic agreement. The latter feature is of course what makes them classifiers per se and distinguishes them from other phoronyms. English pseudopartitive constructions, like those in Mandarin, have the function of specifying NUMBER and of marking CLASS. Most English number marking per se is morphologically separate from and devoid of classification-it does not by itself mark [CLASS]. However, English has the feature of obligatory number agreement. If a noun or a phoronym is itself specified, it is marked by the presence o f either the plural number marker -sl-es, as shown in example (82), or the singular number marker, alan or zero. Because of this rule the phoronym itself always takes number agreement with a numeral. (82) three sheet-s(-)of
paper-{!}
three UCL[+FLArrNUMBr+•LrPSP paper-NUMB1_1 'three sheets ofpaper'
1 . 16. 1 Classifiers' Primary Function: Number Specification Mandarin zhf 'paper' and zhuozi 'table' are count nouns, requiring the classifier zhang 'sheet' to be counted or otherwise specified. English paper, unqualified, is a mass noun requiring the classifier sheet or another phoronym in order to be counted, and table is a count noun requiring the plural marker -s in order to be counted with a numeral larger than 'one'. See examples (83) and (84). Compare (85), which is ungrammatical in both Mandarin and English.
•
THE
CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P HORONYM •
33
(83) yi-zhang
zhi One-UCL[FLAT) paper 'a sheet of paper' or 'one sheet of paper'
(84) san-zhang
zhuozi
three-UCL[FLAT) table 'three tables'
(85)
*san zhf, san zhuozi *three paper, three table50
Despite their surface differences, both languages ultimately require that nouns be specified for NUMBER occur with phoronyms. Example
(85)
at the phrase levef1
when they
is ungrammatical in both Man
darin and English because numerals cannot occur without a phoronym in Mandarin, or before a [-cOUNT] noun in English. Like Mandarin, English does not have grammatical concord52 (as for example Latin, Russian, and Finnish have), so double marking of number specification is disallowed. Accordingly, when the numeral
one or another singular quantifier occurs with a count noun, the singu lar number marker alan is disallowed. For the plural, the phrase-final morpheme -s!-es is obligatory except for lexically plural nouns such as cattle, or lexically neutral nouns such as sheep. Due to the fact that the singular marker is phrase-initial and cannot co-occur with many other forms (the definite article like mass nouns, regularly
the, numerals, etc.), singular count nouns, appear to have a zero suffix marker. 53
In English, if a noun occurs without a number marker, it is treated
sheep, a count noun that is saw a lot of chickens in the road to-
as a mass noun (or, in a few cases such as
unspecifiable for plural), as in I
50. Note that English three sheets ofpaper is different from threepapers, which does not refer to
sheets
of paper, but to 'literary compositions' (which traditionally
have been written on paper).
In
Mandarin the equivalent is
composition', which is classified by specified.
51. Cf.
-pian ucL11TEM)
Aikhenvald (2000: 249). The English numeral
wenzhong
'litera.ry
or -ge ucL1_ cLAss) when it is
one
is not an exception be
cause it is etymologically (and functionally, still) identical to the singular number marker alan. The term 'indefinite article', usual in English linguistics, is opaque at best; as ofl.en noted, the morpheme does not really mark indefiniteness.
52. For the meaning of 'concord' see Appendix E, s.v. Agreement.
53.
Both number-marking morphemes are actually phrase level clitics that are simply affixed to the first or last word of the phrase.
34
I
•
THREE FRUIT BANANA
•
day, versus I saw a lot of chicken in the road today.H This distinction is the same where no phoronym phrase is involved, as in I ate the chickens versus I ate the chicken, or I did not see many chickens ver sus I did not see much chicken. In the former examples, chicken is a count noun with the phrasal clitic plural number marker -sl-es. In the latter examples, chicken is a mass noun with the zero number marker. These examples are identical in structure to typical minimal pairs of count nouns and mass nouns, but the distinction in cases like this can only be made at the phrase level: purely lexically, chicken in modem American English is unspecified for count or mass. As another example, consider an English group classifier expres sion such as a pack of dogs. If the plural number suffix is dropped from the target noun dog (which is lexically set as count), making the expression a pack ofdog, the classifier pack (GCLrcanineJ) in the original example becomes an inanimate phoronym or mensural classifier MCL[rAcKAo�J meaning 'package', the contents of which are dog-meat. The same effect occurs whether the noun dog is indefinite, as in ex ample (86) or definite (i.e., a partitive construction), as in example (87); cf. Joosten (2003) and Corbett (2000). (86) I saw some dog in the road. ' I saw some dog-meat (or, some remains of the dog) in the road.' (87) I saw some ofthe dog in the road. ' I saw part of(the remains ot) the dog in the road.'
1 . 16.2 The Secondary Function of Classifiers: Classification Grammaticized noun categorization, or semantic agreement systems, including classifiers and several other types. occur in specific morpho syntactic loci or environments (Aikhenvald 2000: 8, 1 3 ; Grinevald 2000; Craig 1994). The occurrence of noun classification as one of the potential portmanteau features of phoronyms is thus not at all unusual, and is widespread cross-linguistically (Craig 1994; Allan 1 977). While phenomena involving other classifier functions have received little attention, much has been written on the categorization marked by
54. There are of course other phenomena as well, q.v. Corbett (2000).
•
T H E C A N O N I C A L C L A S S I F I E R P H ORONYM •
35
'true' sortal unit classifiers such as the Mandarin examples in (88) through (97).ss (88) yi-zhi
bl
One-UCL[M:
(89) yi-tiao
she
One-UCL(�NIM�L; EXTENOEONON·R.IGID] Snake 'a snake'
(90) yi-bii
YIZI
One-UCL[IIANDLE. PORT�BLE] Chair 'a chair'
(91) yi-zhang
chwingdiin one-UCL[FLAr] bed.sheet ' a sheet's6
(92) yi-p ic m
wenzhiing
one-UCL[uNtrJ literary.composition 'an essay' or 'an article'
(93) yi-ju
hua
one-UCL[sEr
(94) yi-dong
fangzi
One-UCL[oUILDINO) house 'a house'
(95) yi-li
yao
one-UCL[PARncuJ medicine
'a pill'
55
Other examples are given above in this chapter. For a detailed, nearly exhaustive, and very interesting list, including many forms that are not standard Mandarin, see Chao
(1968).
The treatment in this chapter is based on the Taipei dialect of
spoken standard Mandarin. For a study of commonly
used classifiers, with
frequency and child acquisition data, see Erbaugh (1 986).
56
In American English the noun sheet refers only to
a
'bed sheet'. The word sheet
is otherwise used exclusively as a classifier referring to saliently flat and semi rigid things. If one were to go to a shopping mall information desk and say, "/ want to buy a sheet, " the response would likely be either, "A sheet of what?" (classifier use) or "You mean a bed sheet?" (noun use).
36
1 • THREE FRUIT BANANA
•
(96) yi-zuo shan One-UCL[MOUNTAIN] mountain 'a mountain' (97) yi-shou shf one-UCL[POEMJ poem 'a poem'
While the work done on the semantics of classifier agreement has been extremely tantalizing, and has produced some interesting results (Allan 1977; Denny 1986; Lakoff 1986, 1987), it has been shown that most of these classifier categories are not recognized as categories functionally (Beckwith 1999a) and in fact, the very existence of such categories has been questioned (Lehman 1979, 1990). This problem is examined in Chapter Five.
1.17 The Mandarin Pseudopartitive Construction In Mandarin, a full pseudopartitive construction,57 or classifier phrase, has two major constituents, which are divided into two parts. These are: I . a SPECIFIER (a determiner and/or a numeral) and a PHORONYM, and 2. a NOUN. Additions to this minimum are possible, within strict syntactic constraints, the most significant being the possibility of adjective insertion between the specifier and the phoronym, available with a few mensural classifiers. Adjectives, phrases, and entire clauses may however be freely inserted between the classifier and the noun. Numerals never, and determiners rarely, occur without a phoronym of some kind except in abstract mathematical calculation, such as yijia yi dengyu er, literally, 'one plus one equals two', which does not involve phoronyms because the numerals, which are in such cases nouns themselves, are not used to mark other nouns for number. 58 Classifiers and other phoronyms59 can occur anaphorically without a noun
57. See Chapter Two. 58. Because in mathematical discussions numerals are not qualifiers at all, but nouns, they can even be qualified by phoronym expressions, e.g., nei-ge stinshiwzi bli dui that-UCLf- cLASs] thirty-five not right 'That thirty-five is not right.' 59. Aikhenvald (2000: 1 1 8), claims, "In Nung (Saul and Wilson 1980: 25-9) only classifiers, not quantifiers [= mensura1 c1assiliers-CIB] can be used anaphor ically, i.e., as a 'substitute' for a head noun." If true, this would be an important
•
THE CANONICAL CLASSIFIER P H O RONYM •
37
referent in Mandarin after the introduction of the noun topic into a discourse, but they are always bound to a numeral or determiner, or both.60 A full pseudopartitive construction (or 'classifier phrase') in Mandarin thus obligatorily follows the canonical order presented in Figure 2. ((NUMERAL-PHORONYM] (NOUN]] ([DETERMINER-PHORONYM] [NOUN]] [[DETERMINER-NUMERAL-PHORONYM] (NOUN]] Figure 2. Full Pseudopartitive Constructions in Mandarin
Classifiers are one among several subtypes of phoronym. 61 As nearly all functional typology studies of classifiers have shown, the feature CLASS is one of the potential portmanteau features of phoronyms, but it is by no means obligatory. In addition to this semantic distinction, in some languages there are formal morphosyntactic differences between a few mensural classifiers on the one hand and other mensural and sortal classifiers on the other. The morphosyntax of pseudopartitive constructions is examined in the next chapter.
exception, since no other language seems to have such a constraint. However, Saul and Wilson (1980: 30) actually say, "The [mensural] classifier can substitute for the Noun Head." They also give an example of mensural classifier anaphora (Saul and Wilson 1980: 32). Nung is therefore not an exception to the rule. Cf. Chapter Four, note 20. 60. Anaphora docs not actually occur very frequently in Mandarin, as noted above. Aikhenvald (2000: 99, I 05) claims that in Ejagham, a Benue-Congo language that also has noun classes, "the classifier can be shown to form a constituent with the noun rather than with the numeral (at least prosodically)." She cites no examples that show this, so the exception, if it really is one, requires funher study. 6 1 . See Chapter Eight.
• 2 • A
LOT
O F
D O G •
The Pseudopartitive Construction
In this chapter the grammatical construction n i which PHORONYMS occur is analyzed from the approach of formal typology. It focuses on English, the language that has been most widely discussed in this connection, but also includes data from a number of other languages. The case markers of the PSEUOOPARTITIVE and PARTITIVE constructions in English are identified, and the grammatical status ofphoronyms, including CLASSIFIERS, is clarified.
A
!though formal syntactic work on the PSEUDOPARTITIVE construction has early precedents (Jespersen 1937: 25-26, 128-129), the first important modem study is by Selkirk (1977),' followed by that of Jackendoff (1977). These papers were coincidentally published in the same year as Allan's ( 1977) paper on classifiers, the first prominently published2 modem study on PHORONYMS in the functional typology approach, and the same year as the discussion of classifiers by the general theoretical linguist Lyons ( 1977). Unfortunately, there then followed a substantial lull in interest in these topics among formal linguists, which lasted up until very recently. Moreover, from 1977 to the present there has been no connection whatsoever between the formal and functional typological approaches to the same topic, and both subfields have suffered
I.
2.
She notes as her inspiration the "fundamental insight of Bresnan" that "there exists a QP distinct from NP and AP" (Selkirk 1977: 314 n. 4), though she adds, "the analysis of Noun Phrase, Adjective Phrase, and Quantifier Phrase being proposed here differs in certain ways from that of Bresnan ( 1 973)." There are many other previous works, going back well ove.r two centuries, on classifiers in individual languages, but these are not written in any formal framework.
39
• T H E PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
accordingly. Nevertheless, most writers from the two approaches have independently agreed on a number of basic points: I.
The minimal full construction has three salient constituents (of varying
status), listed here in the order in which they occur in Mandarin and English: 3 i. a SPECIFIER-a determiner and/or a numeral or other quantifier ii. a PHORONYM-a classifier or other (de)nominal morpheme, 'N 1 '4 iii. a NOUN, often called the head noun or target noun, or in discussion of agreement, the controller, 'N2'
2. The order of these constituents can vary from language to language, but the first and second are bound very closely together, to the point that in some lan guages they form a single constituent. By contrast, the third constituent is very loosely connected to the first two, and is omitted in anaphora. 3.
The main function of the first two constituents taken together is to specify
and/or quantify the third constituent.
4. The second constituent can agree with or refer to the third semantically (if only as a selectional constraint), and vice versa.
And that is about all that is widely agreed on, either between the two approaches or among the individual linguists of one or another approach.5 See Figure 6 and Figure 8 below for Mandarin and English tree diagrams that show the status of the constituents graphically.
3.
This constituent is obligatory in most languages examined, but is typically absent in Finnish and Russian phrases semantically equivalent to English ones with the 'indefinite article'. The possibility of omitting a specifier in such cases in English
when the phoronym is plural is only apparent, as the obligatory plural marker -s/
es
specifies the noun it marks. For the terms 'quantifier' and 'specifier' see
Appendix E.
4.
On the term PHORONYM for this constituent, see Appendix E. Very few functional typologists consider it to be a full noun (but
see
Lobel
2000). Formal typologists
generally consider it to be an ordinary noun, but they recognize that the status of (and relationship between) N 1 and N2 is different in partitive and pseudopartitive
constructions (Stavrou
2003; Jackendoff 1977; Selkirk 1977). The N 1
constructions is not a phoronym.
5.
in partitive
Formalists and a few functionalists agree that the entire construction belongs to the same grammatical category as measure phrases and is thus a linguistic
2003; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001; Senft 2000a; Grinevald 1996; DeLancey 1986; Jackendoff 1977; Selkirk 1977; 1972). Aikhenvald (2000) and most other functionalists contest this
universal (Stavrou
2000;
Downing
Greenberg
on semantic grounds.
40
2 • A LOT O F DOG • 2.1 Partitive and Pseudopartitive
The basic dichotomy that concerns most discussions in the formal linguistic literature is between two constructions that are, in English, very similar looking. Jackendoff ( 1 977: for the pseudopartitive, and that in
(I)
a bunch ofmen
(2)
a bunch ofthe men
Selkirk
( 1977)
(2)
1 1 9)
gives the example in ( l )
for the partitive.
first showed that despite earlier formal arguments that
these two constructions were basically the same (Jackendoff
1968),
they are in fact fundamentally different from each other. She says, "Measure phrases like . . . [a
number of objections, three pounds ofstew meat, a bushel of apples, loads of time] are simple noun phrases, not
partitives" (Selkirk
1977: 302). Moreover, "English
noun phrases may
be divided into two types according to the syntactic characteristics of the quantifier and determiner elements specifying the head noun. The first type, that will be called the simple noun phrase, is exemplified by
some people, each woman, an objection. ..
The second type of noun
phrase is the partitive noun phrase. Typical examples of partitives are
many of these people, each of the women, some of her objections, three of the chapters." She adds that unlike partitive
the following:
constructions, "the specifier elements and the head noun of a simple noun phrase must agree for
all
syntactic features-count, number,
gender, case. Thus agreement for syntactic features is an entirely general condition on the well-formedness of simple noun phrases, and is undoubtedly a syntactic universal" (Selkirk
1977: 288-289).
Her
main point is that partitive constructions contain two full NPs, but pseudopartitive constructions only one.6 The pseudopartitive construc tion is in fact simply a kind ofNP, though it is a very special kind. The difference is most clearly marked formally by the obligatory presence of a determiner before the second noun in partitive constructions. This view, having been adopted and developed by Jackendoff
( 1 977),
is
now generally accepted in the literature, though up until very recently
6.
Jespersen (1937: 129) suggests much the same idea, referring in tum to Sweet, whom he quotes as saying, "The nucleus of the group a piece of bread is bread, for piece, although grammatically the head word of the group, is really little more than a form-word." Jespersen ·s reference for the quotation is "NEG § 120."
• T H E PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
41
most formalists have been concerned with the partitive construction to the almost complete exclusion of the pseudopartitive (e.g., Hoeksma 1996). Another distinction that is usually overlooked but should be ex plicitly made is that the inflectional partitive case best known from Finnish marks not the partitive in the sense of the partitive construc tion described above, but, the pseudopartitive (Laakso 2001: 196; Chesterman 1 9 9 1 : 98-99).7 It is shown below that the final constituent of a pseudopartitive construction generally has a distinctive grammati cal form. Sometimes it has a specific inflectional case, as in the Fin nish partitiivi 'partitive case', but in most languages it has an 'overt' zero marker. Here the term PARTITIVE CASE is retained for morpho logical (formal) marking on the target noun (N2) in pseudopartitive constructions. When the phoronym constituent (N 1 ), receives overt morphological marking of its specifically pseudopartitive function, that marking will be referred to as the PSEUDOPARTITIVE CASE. 8 The construction used to express the partitive semantic relation in English and many other languages consists, essentially, of two full nouns obligatorily linked by a genitive marker,9 in which the second noun is obligatQrily specified.10 As shown by Selkirk ( 1977: 308), ofis
7.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001: 524) rightly refers to this and other problems as "the terminological mess in connection with the term 'partitive'."
8.
See below in this chapter. Descriptive grammars of English generally do not distinguish between the partitive and pseudopartitive, labelling them both 'partitive' (e.g., Quirk et al. I 985: 249-252).
9.
Although the partitive in English is formally distinct from the pseudopartitive, it is not distinct from other genitive constructions, of which there are many types. There are also genitive constructions that look superficially like pseudopartitives. Selkirk (I 977: 305) gives an example of a non-pseudopartitive genitive involving extraposition, "Atlantic Richfield was originally scheduled to start delivery this month ofcoalfrom its Thunder Basin Mine south oftown." Although other things might explain why delivery ofcoal is not pseudopartitive, the most crucial here is formal-the absence of the obligatory specifier for delivery. Cf. note 3 above. On the term 'genitive' see Appendix E.
I0. Mass partitives (such as a bo/1/e of that beer) are thus formally distinct from pseudopartitives (Abbott I 996: 33-35) and are identical in form to genitive constructions used for other purposes that have nothing obvious to do with the partitive sense.
42
2 • A LOT
0 F DOG
•
obligatory with the partitive in examples (4) and (5), unlike the pseu dopartitive example in (3). (3)
They sold as many pounds ofapples as they didpears.
(4)
They sold as manypounds ofthose apples as they did ofthose pears.
(5)
*They sold as manypounds ofthose apples as they did those pears.
The 'true' partitive in German, as in (6), is normally constructed with a partitive-genitive marker (von), unlike the pseudopartitive, which requires its absence, as in (7). 1 1 The same holds for many other European languages (Koptjevskaja-Tarnm 2001; Stavrou 2003). The partitive is thus formally distinct from the pseudopartitive not only in English but in most, if not all, European languages. (6)
drei Liter von diesem
Wein
three liter of this.DAT wine 'three liters of this wine'
(7)
drei Glas Bier
three
glass beer 'three glasses of beer'
As noted, the partitive case in Finnish is used specifically to form pseudopartitive constructions. The elative case (elatiivi) is used to form partitive constructions, as shown below. However, this brings up the problem of the distinction between the partitive and the genitive. Studies of the partitive use of the English genitive marker of, which goes back to late Old English (Mitchell 1985: 508, 545-549), show that it is already partly grammaticized for that purpose, as simi lar markers are in some other European languages, such as French and Russian (see below). There are some differences in usage constraints between the partitive and the many other senses of the of construction (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 200 1 : 525; Jackendoff 1977: 1 0 et seq.), but this chapter is not focused on the partitive, and is in any event not the place to attempt to resolve the very big question of what exactly all the parti tive and genitive constructions do.
I I . The Gcnnan examples arc from Koptjcvskaja-Tamm (2001: 549, 552). She includes the alternate fonn Gliiser 'glasses' for the pseudopartitive in example (7). One informant emphatically declared he would never say the resulting drei Gliiser Bier 'three glasses of beer', but an Auslrian colleague says it is nonnal for him to say this. These are a few of the many interesting problems needing study.
o
T H E PSEU OOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION
o
43
Determining the grammatical status of the pseudopartitive con struction (i.e., the 'phoronym phrase' or 'classifier phrase') includes determining to which grammatical categories its constituents belong. As is shown below, a classifier or other phoronym is an essential con stituent of the pseudopartitive construction. In many languages, such as English and Russian, the partitive and pseudopartitive are both normally expressed with what appear to be genitive markers. If both partitive and pseudopartitive constructions actually belong to the same category as genitive constructions, previous studies of classifier con structions have missed something very important.12 Accordingly, the connection between the partitive and genitive must first be clarified.
2.2 Partitive and Genitive The partitive, whether case or <:onstruction or both, is formally distinct from the genitive in many languages, most clearly in Finnish, where the partitive is typically expressed with a different case, the elative (see below). Yet the fact remains that in other languages the partitive is often identical to the genitive-at least in default, unmarked constructions-as it is in English, Russian, and Mandarin. This is undoubtedly because the primary function of the genitive is to mark "the fact that one noun is subordinate to, and a modifier of, another" (Anderson 1985: 185).13 The subordinate relationship between two full nouns or NPs-N1 and N2-is the essence of the partitive as well (i.e., leaving aside argument marking, indefmiteness, and so forth), as shown by Selkirk ( 1977) and J ackendoff ( 1977). 14 The essential subordinating relationship of genitive expressions is more obvious in partitive expressions. When we say the arm of the chair or three bottles of that beer, these phrases mark a specific part
12. Chao ( 1968) does discuss the use of the genitive to form quasiphoronyms in Mandarin, but his treatment is problematic. See Appendix A. 13. Blake ( 1 994: 201) defines the genitive as ''The case that encodes the adnominal relation that :subsumes the role ofpossessor." 14. In many idiomatic expressions the preposition of is used in ways that formally rule out a genitive-partitive. For example, the truth of the maller cannot be rewritten with the suffixed genitive, *the ·maller's truth, indicating that the preposition of is not used in a genitive-partitive sense in this instance.
44
2
•
A LOT OF DOG •
or portion ofN2 (here, chair and beer), so that N2 explicitly represents the unqualified whole. Unlike the pseudopartitive, in the genitive and the partitive it is immaterial whether the suffixed 's genitive or the prepositional of genitive is used-for example, the mannikin 's head or the head of the mannikin.15 What is important is that they are both overtly marked, as noted by Selkirk, who points out that, "in certain circumstances the of may in fact be absent from 'pseudopartitives' while it is never allowed to be absent from real partitives" (Selkirk 1977: 308-309). Partitive constructions, unlike pseudopartitives, always consist of "a noun phrase within a noun phrase" (Selkirk 1977: 288). In a parti tive construction, one constituent noun (N2) is subordinated to the other noun (N1) by a genitive or other case marker, and (N2) must be specified by a determiner or a genitive noun or pronoun.'6 Jackendoff ( 1977: 1 13) states this as the PARTITIVE CONSTRAINT: In an of-N " ' construction interpreted as a partitive, the N'" must have a demonstrative or genitive specifier.
The lack of a formal distinction between the genitive and the partitive17 in default, un-extraposed examples carries over into class noun formation, as in the layout of the garden and the garden layout, the member of the committee and the committee member; a part ofthe body and a body-part, and so on. It is not by any means that all uses of the genitive must be ultimately partitive in the strict sense-many obviously have nothing to do with the partitive, or even really with nouns per se, but rather with the marking of arguments of deverbal
I 5.
In early Old English only a suffixed genitive case existed. The use of the preposition of for the genitive was evidently introduced via translations of biblical and other foreign texts, and spread later throughout the language when internal morphophonological change led to the loss of innectional cases (Mitchell 1985: 508-509).
16. E.g., their, John 's. Jackendoff(l977: 1 13-1 14) adds that the constraint "refers to semantic functions in the specifier, not to syntactic positions" and accordingly, it "is part of the semantic component," a separate matter from his book's main concern (which is syntax), and should be the subject of separate research into "the semantics of specifiers and partitives." 17. Traditional English descriptive grammars, e.g. Quirk et at. ( 1985: 249-252), list the partitive among many functions of the genitive case, but (as in Quirk et at.) they normally make no distinction between partitive and pseudopartitive.
•
THE PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
45
nouns-but only that when the genitive case marks a relationship between two nouns, it marks a subordinate or dependent relationship, including instances where a partitive sense is encoded}8 The same is true of French. where there is no formal difference between du pain in (8), a non-partitive genitive construction, and du pain in (9), a partitive; cf. similarly, des in (W). (8)
J 'ai demande le prx i du pain. ' I asked the price of the bread'
(9)
J'ai achete du pain.
'I bought some bread' . (Lit., 'I bought of/from the bread.')
( 1 0) Elle a achele desjleurs. 'She bought some flowers.' (Lit., 'She bought of/from the flowers.')
In Russian, the genitive (having displaced the old partitive accusatives which are still mentioned in grammars) is used for both partitive and pseudopartitive constructions, as in examples ( 1 1 ) through (13); the only formal distinction is the presence or absence of a specifi.er of N2 (here, the noun voda 'water'). (I I) Daj mne vody. give me water.GEN.SG.FEM Give me (some) water. ( 12) Daj mne casku vody. give me glass.ACC.SG.FEM water.GEN.SG.FEM Give me a glass of water. (13) Daj mne casku toj vody. give me glass.ACC.SG.FEM that.GEN.SG.FEM water.GEN.SG.FEM Give me a glass of that water.
Finally, in Mandarin, partitive constructions are indistinguishable from genitive constructions, as shown in (14) through ( 17). Unlike English and Russian, however, they are obviously unrelated to the pseudopartitive constructions that occur in the same examples. (14) fi mgzi-de fangjiiin house-GEN room '(the) room(s) of (the) house(s)'
18. The phrases the marking ofarguments and arguments of deverbal nouns in this sentence happen to be examples of this particular us:age of the genitive.
46
2 •
A LOT O F DOG •
( 15) nei-dong fangzi-de nei-xie fangjitin that-UCL[oUILOI�G) house-GEN that-PHOR[+PL) room 'those/the room(s) of that/the house' (16) nei-ge ren-de tui that-UCL[·CLASS) man-GEN )eg 'the leg(s) of that/the m an ' or ' that/the man's leg(s)'
(17) ne1-ge
ren-de /iang-ticio tui that-UCL[·CLASS) man-GEN two-UCL[EXTEN0£0 NON·RIGID) )eg 'the two legs of that/the man ' or 'that/the man's two legs'
The fundamental semantic structure of the partitive is thus very deeply involved with that of the genitive. This explains why the grammatical marking of the partitive construction is usually indistinguishable from that of the genitive, and why adjective or attributive marking in many languages often uses the same morpheme as the genitive, as in the Mandarin example in ( l 8). chezi ( 18) hen-da-de APP-big-G EN/ATT car/vehicle 'big car(s)'
In languages of East and Southeast Asia that are considered by functional typologists to be classifier languages, there is no relationship between partitive and genitive constructions on the one hand and the pseudopartitive construction (the 'classifier phrase')-on the other. That is, unlike English and French, where partitive and pseudopartitive constructions are similar in appearance, in these Asian languages they are strikingly different, as shown by the Mandarin examples in ( 14) through ( 17) and the Japanese examples of the partitive in ( 19) and of the pseudopartitive in (20) and (21 )19 below. nonda ( 19) sono sake no naka kara ip-pai that.GEN sake GEN inside from one-MCL[cu•. GLAss) drank 'I drank a glass of that sake.'
19.
Although several classifier specialists cite the different syntactic arrangements possible with Japanese classifiers as options without any semantic distinction, this is not correct. Of the examples here, that in (21) is marked compared to that in (20). The same is true of other examples; e.g., biiru ippai nonda (unmarked) means 'I drank a glass of beer', but ippai no biiru nonda (marked) means 'I drank only one glass of beer'. On the optional accusative marking, see below.
• THE PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
(20) hon (o)
s-satsu i
47
yonda
book (ACC) One-UCLJuoUSD\'OLUME) read 'I read a book.'
(21) s-satsu i
no
hon (o)
yonda
one-UCL(oou�Dvotw.•el GEN book (ACC) read ' I read (only) one book.'
More crucially-from the viewpoint of functional typology-parti tives do not classify anything, the N2 is always definite, and the genitive is evidently always overtly expressed, not only in English (Selkirk 1977: 308-309) but in other languages, including Mandarin and Japanese. All these features are unlike those of pseudopartitive constructions. Although the 'true' partitive has therefore been very much neglected by functional typologists-thus oddly corresponding roughly to the neglect of the pseudopartitive by formal typologists-it should be investigated in Asian and other languages that have distinctive, grammaticized pseudopartitive constructions.
2.3 The Pseudopartitive Construction As discussed above, from her analysis of partitive and pseudopartitive constructions Selkirk concludes that phrases such as a number of objections, three pounds ofstew meat, a bushel of apples, and loads of time are "simple noun phrases, not partitives." She calls these noun phrases pseudopartitives, or the pseudopartitive construction (Selkirk 1977: 302). With the agreement of Jackendoff ( 1977) on the issue, this is now, in essence, the current view in formal typology (Stickney 2004a, 2004b; Stavrou 2003; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001). There are several formal differences between partitive and pseu dopartitive constructions. While partitive constructions such as that in (22) require or imply a restrictive relative clause, as in (23) (Jackend off 1977: 1 09), the pseudopartitive, in (24), does not require or imply one. (22) *the group ofthe men (23) the group ofthe men that you met (24) the group ofmen A distinction in ambiguity is brought up by Selkirk (1977: 307-308); the partitive example in (25) has two possible references (the number
48
2 • A LOT O F D O G
•
she bought or the totality of daffodils available where she bought them), while the pseudopartitive in (26) has only one.20 (25) She bought him a number of those daffodils, only two of which were faded. (26) She bought him a number ofdaffodils, only two ofwhich werefaded.
She notes that the sentence in (25) is "ambiguous because the relative clause may be associated with either of two NPs-the entire partitive noun phrase [a number]21 of those daffodils, or the lower one, those daffodils . . " By contrast, in example (26), "there is no lower NP. The relative clause cannot associate with of daffodils, only with the full noun phrase, [a number] of daffodils." Jackendoff (1977: 123) remarks, "This difference is easily accounted for if a number of those daffodils includes two N''' to which relative clauses can be attached, but a number of daffodils contains only one such N"' . . . We conclude therefore that a group of men is not a true partitive." This is similar to Selkirk's (1977: 309) conclusion that in pseudopartitive constructions "the measure noun phrase NiP [is] sister to the constituent N ." Selkirk (1977: 316 n. 15), cites Milner ( 1975) as analyzing French constructions such as tros i kilos de pommes 'three kilos of potatoes' and une grande quantile de vin blanc 'a large quantity of white wine' as pseudopartitives. She adds, "In this analysis, too, the measure phrase is generated as sister to the N and the particle de is inserted by transformation." The pseudopartitive in the French example in (27) is distinguished from the partitive in (28) by the presence of a deter miner, in accordance with the Partitive Constraint. .
,
(27) 11 a bu un verre de biere. 'He drank a glass of beer.' (28) II a bu un verre de Ia biere. 'He drank a glass of the beer.'
20. Also, while the partitive in (2.5) refers to a smaller number of daffodils that were bought from among a larger number that were available, in (26) the pseudoparti tive refers to all the daffodils that were bought and does not tell us anything about the quantity of daffodils at the source where she bought them. There are two propositions in the partitive construction in (25), but one in the pseudopartitive construction in (26). 21. Selkirk's original examples have "dozens." I follow Jackendoff's versions with a number to avoid the problems with the word dozens (Selkirk 1977: 308).
•
THE PSEUDO PARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION
•
49
The conclusions of Selkirk ( 1 977: 313) and Jackendoff (1977: 1 12, 120) are presented in Figures 3 and 4 below. The recent interpretation of Stavrou (2003: 342) is given in Figure 5 , with reference to the Greek examples in (29) and (30). NP N"
------
NP
N'
�
I
Det
N"
N
a
N'
flowers
I
I
� I
bunch (of) Figure 3. The pseudopartltlve according to Selkirk
N
�..
N
,
�
N'
of
�
I
N
a bunch
I
men Figure 4. The pseudopartitive according to Jackendoff QP/NUMP
------
Q'INUM'
SPEC
------
CP/MP
QINUM
I
po/a ena
�
CLF/M
N(P)
potiria potiri
krasi krasi
I
J
Figure 5. The pseudopartltlve according to Stavrou.
50
2 • A
LOT 0 F DOG
•
(29) pola potiria krasi
many glasses wine 'many glasses ofwine' (30) ena potiri krasi one glass wine 'a/one glass of wine'
Of the above analyses, that by Selkirk is the closest to the analysis in Figure 8. See below on the problems with these analyses, in particular the problem of ofin English (and similarly, de in French).
2.4 Morphology of the Pseudopartitive Despite much discussion, the question of the overt marker used for partitive and pseudopartitive constructions in some languages has remained highly problematic (Stickney 2004a, 2004b). English and French use the same marker for both constructions, and it is obligatory in partitive constructions, but in English, at least, it can sometimes by omitted in pseudopartitive constructions-for example, with numeral nouns like dozen(s) and hundred(s), of is omitted after the singular which makes sense in view of Selkirk's (1977) demonstration that unlike partitives, pseudopartitive constructions contain only one proposition. In German the partitive is obligatorily expressed with the genitive as well, as in example (6) above, while the pseudopartitive has no genitive marking, as in example (7). This is logical because the pseudopartitive is a simple noun phrase, while the partitive construc tion consists of two full nouns or noun phrases subordinated to each other by a genitive-partitive marker. In Finnish, pseudopartitive constructions are expressed with the partitive case (partitiivi), as in (32) and (33), unlike 'true' partitive constructions, which are normally expressed with the elative case (elatiivi), as shown in (35) through (37). 22 (31) seitsemiin
veljestii
seven.NOM brother.PART.SG 'seven brothers'
22. Examples (31) and (33) are titles of Finnish novels. Examples (32) and (36) through (39) are from Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001 : 537, 524).
• THE PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
51
(32) sakki perunoita sack.NOM.SG potato.PART.P.L 'a sack of potatoes' (33) p1em pa/a onnea little.NOM bit.NOM.SG happiness.PART.SG 'a little bit of happiness' (34) kaksi poikaa two boy.PART.SG 'two boys• (35) kaksi pojista two boy.ELAT.PL 'two of the boys'
hanen ve/jistaan (36) kaksi two.NOM 3SG.GEN.ANIM brother.ELAT.PL.3SGPOSS 'two of his/her brothers' (37) pala tasta hyvasta kakusta bit.NOM.SG this.ELAT.SG good.ELAT.SG cake.ELAT.SG 'a bit of this good cake'
However, there is some overlap in the use of the two cases. The partitive case can sometimes be used in the partitive construction as well. Finnish i s thus unlike most other languages in that the choice of distinctive case marking on the target noun allows some very fine differences to be made, as seen in the sentences in (38) and (39), both of which are partitive constructions. (38) Anna minu//e /itra tuoreesta maidosta-si give me.AiLL liter.NOM fresh.ELAT.sg milk.ELAT.SG.-2SG.POSS 'Give me a liter of your fresh milk.' (39) Anna minulle /itra tuoretta maitoa-si give me.ALL liter.NOM fresh.PART.SG milk.PART.SG.-2SG.POSS 'Give me a liter of your fresh milk.'
In example (38), 'milk' in the elative case refers to a particular amount or container of milk, i.e., 'of the milk that you have', while in (39), 'milk' in the partitive case refers to an unspecified quantity of milk, i.e., 'of milk that you have'. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (200 1 : 532) cites Leino's (1 993) explanation to the effect that, "whenever there is a choice between a partitive-marked and an elative-marked comple ment to a quantifier, the former seems to be the neutral choice for simply mentioning the quantity of the substance, while the latter
52
2
• A
LOT OF DOG
•
somehow involves a part-of operation, treating the substance as a predefined entity in some way." She concludes that, "elatives combine most naturally with words referring to parts of a whole .. (Koptjev skaja-Tamm 2001 : 532), i.e., 'true' partitives. In some instances, parti·cularly when a partitive construction is the object of a transitive verb, it is possible to use either the elatiivi or the partitiivi, as in two examples given by Koptjevskaja-Tarnm (200 I: 53 1 ), Anna minulle pala tasta hyviistii kakusta (in the elatiivi) and Anna minu/Je pala tiitii hyvaii kakkua (in the partitiivi), both meaning 'Give me a bit of this good cake'. There does not seem to be any sig nificant difference between these examples. which are felt to have the same partitive sense, but that is also, or mainly, due to the fact that the noun in both sentences is preceded by a determiner, making both of them partitive constructions. These examples, and those in (38) and (39), suggest that case marking in such instances is subordinate to the constructions' primary partitive or pseudopartitive semantics, as in complex partitive constructions in English.21 Formal case marking in Finnish thus distinguishes rather clearly between the partitive (expressed with the e/atiivi or elative case) and the pseudopartitive (expressed with the partiliivi or partitive case), although the categories are not always very sharply demarcated other wise (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001: 532-533). Hungarian too makes a clear distinction between partitive and pseudopartitive. In (40), the partitive is marked by the ablative case, while in (4 1 ) the pseudopartitive is marked by zero.24 (40) egy liter ab-ba/
a piros le-bO/ one liter that-ABL the red juice-ABL 'a liter of that red juice' (lit., 'a liter from that red juice')
(41) harom liter piros /e three liter red JUICe 'three �iters of red juice' (lit., 'three liters red juice')
What, then, is a genitive marker doing in English and French pseudopartitive constructions? The 'problem of of is referred to time and again in the literature. Generally it is treated as something that is
23. Pirkko Forsman-Svensson (p.c.) notes the oddity of these two sentences, as well as those in (38) and (39). 24. Koprjevskaja-Tamm (200 I : 557) marks te in (41) as nominalivc case.
•
T H E PSEUDOPA RTITIVE CONSTRUCTION
•
53
not in the underlying structure, but must be inserted (Selkirk 1977; Jackendoff 1977: 107, citing Chomsky 1 970): "Returning to the of, we have the choice of introducing it in underlying structure. . .o r by a simple local transformation" (Jackendoff 1977: 1 2 1 ), the latter being the usual choice (cf. Selkirk 1 977: 3 1 6 n. 15).2s In recent grammatical theories (presaged by work going back some thirty years or more), the place of of in 'true' partitives is crystal clear-it is the head of its own prepositional phrase. However, in the pseudopartitive construction it obviously does not head a prepositional phrase. As Stickney (2004b: 4 1 ) pointedly notes, it is unclear just what of is doing in the English pseudopartitive. The problem is largely due to the fact that of occurs not only in both partitive and pseudopartitive constructions but also in genitives, obscuring the fact that the two constructions themselves, and the se mantics of each, are distinct. As shown above, partitive and pseudo partitive are fundamentally different from each other in most lan guages that have been discussed in connection with these construc tions. In Finnish, the partitive, pseudopartitive, and genitive are clearly distinguished by the assignment of a different case to each. In English, the noun governed by ofalso tells us little; it can be singular or plural, count or mass in both types of construction, although in partitives it requires a determiner or genitive noun (or pronoun), neither of which can occur in pseudopartitives. These constraints are identical to those on Mandarin partitives and pseudopartitives. Consider examples (42) through (44). (42)
ren-de
tui
man-GEN leg '(a)(the) leg{s) of (a)(the) man/men' or '(a)(the)man/men 's leg(s)' (43)
yi-tiao
tui liiing-tiao
tui
One-UCL[EXTEliDED NON·RIGID] leg t\VO-UCL[EXTENDED NON·RIGID] leg 'one leg, two legs'
25.
According to Stavrou (2003: 344, citing Cheng and Sybesma 1999), Cantonese Chinese partitive constructions are definite, while pseudopartitive (classifier) constructions are indefinite in both Cantonese and Mandarin. In Vietnamese, it is said that the phoronym can be a noun referring to apart of the second noun (e.g., the leg of a dog), apparently forming a partitive construction. These appear to be similar to pseudopartitive constructions, and have been analyzed as such by Lobel (2000: 274-278); it would now seem desirable to reanalyze them.
54
2 • A
(44) nei-ge
ren-de
•
LOT OF DOG
litmg-tiao
tul
that-UCL[.cLASs] man-GEN twO-UCl[EXTENDEDNO:<·RlCID]Jeg '{the) two legs of that man' or 'that man's two legs'
Example (42) is a simple genitive-partitive construction. The default citation form of nouns in Mandarin, as in English, is sans specifiers, so literally this phrase corresponds exactly to 'man's leg' or 'leg ofman'. (The default syntactic forms in the two languages are set differently, so the second English equivalent is highly marked.) Use of the genitive here makes the Mandarin example specifically partitive. Example (43) contains two simple pseudopartitive constructions. Example (44) consists of two full pseudopartitive constructions linked by the genitive, which makes the entire phrase a partitive construction. Figure 6 illustrates a maximal pseudopartitive construction in Mandarin, nei san dongfangzi 'those three houses'. 'l'P
N
S/<1>
-------
s
�
o
Q
nei
san
that
three
I
I
I
I
fangzi
house
dong UCL[BUILDING]
Figure 6. A maximal Mandarin pseudopartitlve construction
The partitive is therefore clearly dependent on the genitive suffix -de, which is obligatorily absent in the pseudopartitive constructions. Cf. the similar German examples in (6) and (7) above. The of in an English partitive construction belongs to its preposi tional phrase, which contains a full DP (an NP formally headed by a Determiner) that it governs exactly as in other genitive constructions, as in (45). This is clear because the construction is frequently inter changeable with one in which the head noun takes the genitive case suffix instead, as in (46). (45) a leg ofthe chair, the money ofthe bank (46)
the chair's leg, the·bank 's money
• THE PSEU DOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
55
In both subtypes of genitive-partitive constructions a genitive marker
of one kind or the other is obligatory. In pseudopartitive constructions, by contrast, the head noun can not alternately take the genitive case suffix 's instead of the of In fact, in pseudopartitives the of [�v] is typically reduced to -a/'o [�]. and in some cases it can even be omitted (Abbott 1996: 34; Selkirk 1977: 308-309). This is because the of is a constituent together with the phoronym, not the noun, as shown below. It is thus clear that in this type of construction of does not mark the genitive or genitive-partitive on the noun (N2), it marks the pseudopartitive on the phoronym (N1). The difference is shown in the parsing of (47) and (48).
(47) a-cup-of
coffee
NUMB[scrcup-PSP coffee 'a cup of coffee'
(48) a-cup
of-the-coffee
NUMB[scrcup GEN/PART-DET[oErrcoffee 'a cup of the coffee'
The distinctive marking of the pseudopartitive in English deserves special attention. In modem English the only productive, freely usable, overtly marked nominal case form is believed to be the suffixed genitive 's. The prefixed genitive of is also an inherited form, but it is not originally a case marke.r, and in its genitive use it is still grammatically a preposition. In Old English, the cases are marked by suffixes, all of which have been lost in the modem language in nominal inflection except for the genitive 's (Blake 1 994: 1 80), which is still productive.26 In modem English the case that marks relations between nouns is thought to be the genitive, while all other structural cases-the assignment of which involves verbs to a large extent-now have no overt inflectional markers. However, in light of the special marking of the pseudopartitive construction, it seems that the simplest
26. It has, of course, a possessive function as well as the ordinary genitive function, so it is now commonly referred to as the 'possessive', and it is claimed that there is no nominal case marking in modem English. I disagree with this view. In my opinion, there are several kinds of case markers, i.e., clause structure case markers (the 'primary' cases), NP internal relationship case markers, and adverbial case markers. Perhaps the tenn 'case' should not be applied to all of them, but the issue is complex and outside the scope of the present book.
56
2 • A LOT 0 F DOG •
explanation of the mysterious -of is that it is simply a second noun relational case marker.27 But it is different from the Finnish partitive case. In English the case is marked on N 1 (rather than N2 as in Finnish), so it is the PSEUDOPARTITIVE CASE specifically. In func tional terms, English marks the phoronym (N1) for pseudopartitive case and the target noun (N2) with a 'marked' zero ending..
2.5 The Pseudopartitive Case Marker The distinction between pseudopartitive and partitive-genitive is marked not only by syntactic usage patterns, but by morpho phonology. Jackendoff (1977: 1 3 1 n. 15) notes: There is also the intennediate reduction a coup/a trees, occurring with other group nouns as well, e.g. a b11ncha trees. This reduction depends on ofbeing a daughter of N". Notice that in the following example, the reduction is impossible: (i) We bought a couple (of) pictures of Fred, and a
{
}
couple of
?•coupla
Bill.
The reason is that the final NP in this S is the result of N'-Gapping and hence has the structure [N'"[N"a couple[N'PRO of Bill]]). The presence of PRO inhibits the reduction of of
The full underlying form of the sentence in question is, We bought a couple of28 pictures of Fred, and a couple of pictures of Bill, or We bought a coup/a pictures of Fred and a coup/a pictures of Bill. Another example, with determiners, is given in (49). (49) We bought a coup/a pictures ofthe cat, anda
{
}
couple of •coupIa
the dog.
In spoken standard American English, coup/a, as well as buncha, Iotta, cuppa, and many other similar forms in which of [av] has been
27. cr. Stickney (2004b). 28. Jackendoff ( 1977: 131) says "a couple trees" is acceptable in his dialect. This may be an example (like a dozen, a hundred) of case drop with numerical phoronyms.
• THE PSEU DOPARTITIYE CONSTRUCTION •
57
reduced to a suffixed -a [a] (in other instances sometimes written 'o), are normal spoken and even written forms.29 The crucial point is that so far as overt marking in example (49) is concerned, a coup/a/{= a couple of) pictures is a clear pseudopartitive (pictures is unspecified). By contrast, *a coup/a/(= a couple of) the dog is an anaphoric pseudopartitive (a couple [ofpictures]) plus a full partitive phrase of the dog (because dog is specified by the). While the first of can be reduced in a pseudopartitive, the second ofcannot be either reduced or omitted in the partitive because it is a part of the N2 constituent and it is also the formal head of its phrase. The examples of extraposition in (52) through (55) may help to further clarify the morpheme boundaries. Examples (50) and (51) are of ordinary pseudopartitive and partitive constructions respectively. The extraposed examples in (53) and (55) are acceptable because they are partitives, not pseudopartitives.
(50) We bought a bunch/couple ofthings. (51)
We bought a bunch/couple ofthe things.
(52) *Where are things we bought a bunch/couple of? (53) Where are the things we bought a bunch/couple of? (54)
*Where are things ofwhich we bought a bunch/couple?
(55) Where are the things ofwhich we bought a bunch/couple? Extraposition also clarifies the status of phoronyms. Neither (57) nor (58) is grammatical as a postposed version of (56), which is a strictly pseudopartitive construction. This indicates that the word piece is a true sortal unit classifier here. (56) I bought a piece offurniture.
(57) *Where isfurniture I bought a piece of? (58) *Where is thefurniture I bought a piece of? The pseudopartitive is thus marked by postposed of, which has two allomorphs: a suffixal clitic ojl[av] and a suffix -al'ol[a]. Although the morpheme of is shared with the genitive-partitive, in the latter it can-
29. It is well known that postpositions often develop into clitics and inflectional affixes diachronically (Anderson 1985: 186).
58
2 • A LOT OF DOG •
not be reduced to -a/ 'ol[a], while the pseudopartitive cannot be marked by the partitive-genitive 's. These are formal distinctions. It is significant that the marker of the pseudopartitive occupies the same suffixed position as that occupied by the partitive-genitive case suffix 's. One of the functions of the partitive-genitive is to mark def initeness on the noun. By definition the noun in a pseudopartitive can not be definite, so the partitive-genitive case ending 's specifically excludes the pseudopartitive function. This may account for the devel opment of what appears to be a new case form occupying the same position as the suffixed partitive-genitive. Modem English thus has distinctive non-zero noun-relating mor phological case markers for two distinct inflectional cases: the PARTI TIVE-GENITIVE CASE, with 's/of- (and also from; see below), and the PSEUDOPARTITIVE CASE, with -ojl-a/- 'o!la]. These exist in English in both senses of the term 'case', inflectional ("flexional') and Fillmorean (Blake 1 994: I , 9, 23-24, 6 1 ; cf. Jackendoff 1977: 80-8 1). The case marking pattern, illustrated for the pseudopartitive in example (59) and the partitive in examples (60) and (61 ), is summarized in Figure 7 . Classifiers and other phoronyms in English are therefore formally marked as such by the pseudopartitive case. See also the diagram in Figure 8, which shows that the phoronym plus pseudopartitive case marker form one constituent (the phoronym constituent). This explains why the pseudopartitive case marker oftypically reduces to [a], unlike the partitive-genitive markers ofand 's, which cannot reduce. PSEUDOPARTITIVE N 1 has pseudopartitive case marking, N2 has zero case marking N1-ojl-al- 'o l{a] NrB PARTITIVE-GENITIVE N 1 has zero case marking, N2 has partitive-genitive case marking o.f-N2 N 1 -fJ ( Nr's ) N2-'s N1-B =N1-B Figure 7. English pseudopartitlve and partitive-genitive case marking
(59) a/the bunch ofbananas = a/the buncha bananas (60) a/the handle ofthe cup ( *a/the hand/a the cup) (61) the cup 's handle
•
59
T H E PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
'I'P N
S/<1>
�
-------
S(D/Q)
�
D
�
Det
I
tho-
�
Flex
Quan
I
I
-se
Q
Comp
� Flex I I
Phor
cuppod
-s-
Nn
I
coffee whale-
Flex
I
-s
'o/of
- 'olof
two a
Figure 8. English Pseudopartitive Constructions
In view of the complete morphological distinction between the pseu dopartitive and the partitive-genitive, and the obligatorily unmarked status of the target noun (N2) in English pseudopartitive constructions, the marking of the pseudopartitive in Dutch, German, Greek, Uzbek, Japanese, and so on, and in particular, their overt equivalent of the English pseudopartitive case marker for the phoronym (N1)-in some cases a 'marked' zero-is worthy of further study.30
2.6 Complex Partitives and Pseudopartitives In many languages the partitive is expressed by the ablative case. Consider examples (62) through (66) from Turkish and examples (67) and (68) from German.31 bir-i (62) ev-ler-den house-PL-ABL one-3SG.POS 'one of the houses' (63) Ali siit-ten if-li Ali milk-ABL drink-PAST 'Ali drank some of the milk.'
30. For an attempt to show how the pseudopartitive construction fits within English syntax in general, see Appendix C. 31. Examples (63) through (65), (68), (69), and {72)"are from Kornfilt (1 996: 106, 1 14, 140), with slight modifications ofher glosses and translations.
60
2 • A LOT OF DOG •
(64) Ahmet pasta-dan iki dilim ye-di Ahmet cake-ABL two slice eat-PAST 'Ahmet ate two slices of the cake.' (65) kitap-lar-dan bir-i-ni oku-du-m book-PL-ABL one-POSS-ACC read-PAST-1 SG 'I read one of the books. •
dizi-den bir kilap oku-du-m (66) o that series-ABL one book read-PAST- ISG 'I read a book from that series.' dem .frischen Sa/at gekauft (67) Ich habe von have of/from the fresh lettuce bought 'I have bought some of the fresh lettuce.'
(68) Ich habe von
dem Wein getrunken
have of/from the wine drunk ' I have drunk some of the wine.'
Turkish regularly constructs the part itive with the ablative case marker, which is traditionally called the 'ablative partitive' (Komfilt 1996: 107, citing Lewis 197 5), though there seems to be no other way to construct a true partitive in Turkish. German, like French, uses an ablative-genitive preposition for the same purpose. The pseudo partitive in Turkish is radically different from the partitive m con struction, as shown in examples (69) through (72). (69) on baf koyun ten head (UCL[CATmJ) sheep 'ten head of sheep' or 'ten sheep'
(70) on ba�
s1g1r
ten head (UCL[cATTLE)) cattle/cow 'ten head of cattle' or 'ten cows'
bira (71) bir bardak one glass .(MCL[GLASsJ) beer 'a glass of beer' (72) Ahmet iki �i�e :jarap r;al-d1 Ahmet two bottle (MCL[aom..EJ) wine steal-PAST 'Ahmet stole two bottles of wine.'
•
THE PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION
•
61
2. 7. Complex Partitives Although from the discussion so far it might seem that the partitive in English is expressed exclusively by genitive-partitive marking, in fact ablative marking is also used. English of course no longer has an actual case form for the ablative, but the preposition from marks the same function. It is sometimes used in simple partitive expressions too, but in complex partitives that include a pseudopartitive with a mass, collective, or plural head noun, which may be called COMPLEX PARTITIVES,jrom, rather than of, is obligatory, as shown in examples (74) through (86). (73) He drank the keg ofbeer thatjust arrived. (74) *He drank a mug ofthe keg ofbeer thatjust arrived. (75) *He drank a mug ofbeer ofthe keg thatjust arrived. (76) He drank a mugfrom the keg ofbeer thatjust arrived. (77) He drank a mug ofbeerfrom the keg thatjusl arrived. f f urniture she bought. (78) *She gave me a piece of a/the set o (79) She gave me the best piecefrom a set offurniture she bought. (80) She gave me apiece offurniturefrom a/the set she bought. (81)
*She gave me a piece ofthe pieces offurniture she bought.
(82)
*She gave me a piecefrom thepieces o f f urniture she bought.
(83) *They saw a lion of apride of lions they had seen before. (84) They saw a /ionfrom a pride of/ions they hadseen before. (85) *an item ofthose items ofnews (86) an itemfrom those items ofnews
Example (80). She gave me a piece offurniture from a/the set (of furniture) she bought, consists of two well-formed pseudopartitive constructions connected by the ablative from, which marks the first pseudopartitive phrase as a partitive (portion sense) of the second. It is possible that example (82) *She gave me a piece from the pieces of furniture she bought is unacceptable on semantic grounds (it would have the sense of a part or portion of more than one piece of furniture), but the main reason is that piece is a unit classifier-see example (79), where piece is used anaphorically for a piece offurniture {i.e., the
62
2 • A LOT 0 F DOG •
whole object, such as a whole chair, or a whole table)-and by defi nition cannot be subdivided. (If it does refer to a part of something, it is of course involved in a partitive construction, and requires that the noun target be definite.) By contrast, She gave me a piece of(orfrom) a piece offurniture she bought would be correct, but although a piece offurniture is a pseudopartitive, the preceding a piece of/from is a partitive construction (its target, the second piece, is specified with a), with the meaning 'a part of; the sentence means that the speaker re ceived a part of one piece offurniture-e.g., a leg of a chair, a broken piece of wood from a table, etc. Note that "a broken piece of wood from a table" is itself a complex partitive construction and accordingly takesfrom, not *of The requirement that an ablative marker be used for a complex partitive construction is found in other languages as well, but this is evidently because the simple partitive itself, being marked as definite, requires an ablative construction. In Japanese, the ablative postposi tion kara, following the postpositional noun phrase no naka-literally, '(the) inside of-marks the partitive, as shown in (87) through (89), as well as complex partitive constructions, as in (90) through (92).32 ln (87) and (89) the numeral plus classifier unit is used as an anaphor for a full pseudopartitive construction/3 exactly as in complex English partitives (see the preceding examples). In examples (88) and (90) through (92), full pseudopartitive constructions are given. yonda i (87) hon no naka kara s-satsu book GEN inside from one-UCLroouNovoLuMEl read 'I read one of the books.' (88)
Taro no
hon o
is-satsu
yonda.
Taro GEN book ACC one-UCL[oousovoLUME] read ' I read one of Taro's books.'
The English sense of 'I read one of Taro's books' in (88) may also be expressed as Taro no hon no naka kara is-satsu yonda, with the literal sense 'I read one from among the books of Taro.'
32. The accusative marker o is often omitted; it may be added in more formal speech. 33. The noun is usually omitted to avoid redundancy when it is already mentioned at the beginning of the sentence, e.g., hon in (87), kami in (89).
• T H E P S E U D O P A RTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
------ ·63
(89) komi no
naka kara ichi-mai
folia
paper GEN inside from one-ucL1rwJ took 'I took alone sheet of the paper.'
(90) taru
no
naka kara sake ip-pai
nonda
barrel GEN inside from sake one-McL1cLAss) drank
'I drank a glass of sake from a/the barrel (of sake).'
(91) sono laru
no
naka kara sake o
ip-pai
nonda
that barrel GEN insi de from sake ACC o ne-MCLicLAssJ drank 'I drank a glass of sake from that barrel (of sake).'
(92) sono sosho
no naka kara hon o
s-satsu i
yonda
that book.series GEN inside from book ACC one-UC4oousovoLu>�EI read 'I read a book from that series.'
2.8 Sortal versus Mensural Classifiers One of the most significant open disagreements among functional typologists concerns whether or not there is a genuine distinction be tween sortal and mensural classifiers. Some usage constraints have been noted, but they are so highly constrained that they can hardly be considered as markers of a clear type division. Though claims to the effect have been made, they also do not seem to constitute a hard and fast rule in any individual case, not to speak of cross-linguistically (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 14-1 16). In the study of pseudopartitive construc tions in English this problem has not even been mentioned. The term 'classifier' has been applied unabashedly to what even generous classifier specialists would want to call 'measures' at best, and 'ordinary nouns used as quasiphoronyms' at worst. One reason is that while the English pseudopartitive construction is distinctive both syntactically and morphologically, the lone published article (Leh rer 1986) that attempts to apply the idea of the classifier to English is simply uninformed about what classifiers are like in languages that have extensive, obligatory sortal unit classifier systems.34
34. It is unfortunate that in Lehrer's entire long paper, in which she mentions "classifier languages" numerous times, and actually cites several important studies of classifiers, including Allan ( 1977) and Lehman
( 1979),
she does not
give a single example, nor mention by name a single classifier language, not even Chinese.
64
2 • A LOT O F DOG
•
English does, however, have a number o f frequently used pseudo partitive constructions in which the phoronyms are very difficult to explain as anything but classifiers, pure and simple. These cannot be rewritten as partitives with single referents, unlike most measures and ordinary nouns that can be used as phoronyms in pseudopartitive con structions, which can be so rewritten. In other words, it is possible to rewrite a pseudopartitive such as a pound of sugar as a partitive, a pound of the sugar, when the reference (here, sugar) is to one specific thing (usually, in contrast to something else). Rewriting is even possi ble when both N1 and N2 are defined, given the right context, as in example (93), where both a cup of sugar and a cup of something else have previously been mentioned. (93)
Give me the cup ofthe sugar.
But when the topic of reference is only one piece of furniture, one item of news, one ear of com, one sheet of paper, or one head of cattle, even with additional referential information (such as 'the one you bought for me'), rewriting is impossible. In other words, when there is
only one referent available it is not possible to rewrite a pseudo partitive as a partitive, as shown in examples (94) through (98). (94) a piece offurniture - the piece offurniture - *thepiece of thefurniture (95) an item ofnews - the item ofnews - *the item ofthe news (96) an ear ofcorn - the ear ofcorn - *the ear ofthe corn (97) a sheet ofpaper - the sheet ofpaper - *the sheet of the paper
35 (98) a head ofcattle - the head of caule - *the head of the cattle The same constraint applies to English group classifiers (q. v. Chapter Three), e.g., the herd of cattle - *the herd of the cattle. Although at first glance it may be thought that this rule does not apply to a piece of paper, it too is no exception. It is true that even if only one sheet of paper were available, it would be quite acceptable and understandable to ask for a piece of the paper, but the meaning would then be quite different. In such a situation, if a speaker asks for the piece ofpaper, it is a pseudopartitive and means the sheet of paper the entire thing -
35. The unit classifier head seems not to occur at all in the singular and is rarely used with small numbers of cattle.
• T H E PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION •
65
(i.e., the whole sheet of paper). By contrast, a piece of the paper, a true partitive, refers specifically to a part of the whole sheet of paper, and the piece of the paper would refer to one specific part of the whole sheet of paper.36 The above examples indicate that some phoronyms in English have become granunaticized as sortaJ unit classifiers of the nouns to which they are assigned. It a�so confmns that classifiers are. strictly non-partitive in sense; they do not refer to parts of things, or even units of things (as most functional typologists put it), they refer to whole things. The same is true for animate group classifiers, which form a coherent classifier system in English, as shown in Chapter Three. But it is aaso true even of mensural classifiers involving contain ers, as in example (99), where a mug of beer refers to the entirety of beer in the mug, not to any external amount, unlike the partitive in (100), which does (and which requires either previous context or addi tional information). (99) He drank a mug ofbeer.
(100) He drank a mug ofthe beer (which arrivedyesterday). Consider the French example in (101). Someone "drinks all the beer in the glass and he drinks a whole glass. We are not thinking of all the beer in the world."37 In a 'true' partitive situation-referring to a portion ('some') of the beer-such as in ( 1 02), the target noun must be specified.
(101) II a bu un verre de biere. 'He
drank a glass ofbeer.'
( 1 02) II a bu un verre de Ia barrique de biere. 'He
drank a glass from the barrel of beer.'
36. In such a context, a piece ofpaper would be ambiguous. It could mean either a (whole) sheet of paper (the speaker ignoring the fact that only one sheet is available), or a portion of(the sheet of) paper, in a partitive sense. If pragmatics are not allowed to operate like this (i.e., if the situation with the paper cannot be ignored), the· speaker would perforce have to ask :for the sheet ofpaper or the piece ofpaper in order to get the entire sheet, or a piece ofthe/thatpaper in order to get a portion of it.
37. Emanuel Mickel (p.c. 2004), who adds that "the French would say un verre de
biere because you are drinking all the beer in that glass."
66
2 • A LOT OF D O G •
The point is that phoronyms always refer to This
is true of every phoronym type,
repeaters. In
ten head of cattle,
wholes,
never to parts.
including
classifiers and
head
refers to whole
the phoronym
animals. In languages where a classifier is required to specify the meaning
'head'- e.g.
Mandarin
san-ge tau
noun
three-UCL1-cLAssJ head
'three heads'-the classifier refers to whole heads, not parts of heads. In conclusion, this chapter has shown that 'classifier phrases' and phoronym phrases in general in Mandarin, English, and other lan guages, regardless of whether they are considered to be 'classifier languages' by functional typologists, clearly are pseudopartitive con structions. These constructions and partitive-genitive constructions are different formally in all languages examined-in most cases radically different. Because phoronyms always mark wholes, pseudopartitive constructions are also not just 'different'
semantically
from partitives,
they are practically the opposite of them. The traditional term 'pseu dopartitive' is thus fundamentally misleading. What have been said to be classifier constructions in English belong formally to the category of the pseudopartitive construction, and in English the phoronym in this construction carries a formal pseudopartitive case marker. There are, in addition, specific occur rence constraints that distinguish English sortal unit classifiers and some mensural classifiers from quasiphoronyms and other mensural classifiers. In short, some English phoronyms are specifically marked as classifiers in terms of comparative typology, and despite functional typologists' objections, the formalists' occasional use of the term 'classifiers' is after all correct for a subset of English phoronyms.38
38.
This chapter is not intended to be a complete fonnal analysis of anything, including pseudopartitive constructions. Among the many topics that deserve further extended analysis are complex partitive-pseudopartitive constructions, case dropping, double case marking, constraints on embedding pseudopartitive constructions, and the possibility of other uses of the pseudopartitive case.
• 3 • A
P O D
O F
W H A L E S •
The Group Classifier
The little-studied subtype of PHORONYM known as the GROUP CLASSIFIER constitutes one of the two main varieties of ' true' sortal classifiers. Exclusion of group classifiers from most studies of classifiers is due largely to the fact that they are not a significant type in most languages that have well-known unit classifier systems. This chapter examines them closely, and suggests that the major difference between language types with respect to classifiers may be in the relative salience of their unit or group classifiers.
T
he type of CLASSIFIER PHORONYM most familiar to speakers of English is the GROUP CLASSIFIER, of which the sortal type
such as a pack ofdogs, a school offish, aflock ofbirds
is the
-
best known due to popular literary treatments. In that literature, however, and in traditional grammars, they are not treated as classifiers but as 'collective nouns' (Collings, 1993; cf. Crystal 1995: 209), or as 'venery', the latter being originally hunter's terms for animals, but now a sort of literary toy (Lipton 1991 ). Among recent functional typology treatments of them, that by Rijk.hoff (2002: 48-49) is perhaps the most accurate, though it is very brief. He divides sortal classifiers "into classifiers that are used to count single entities (sometimes called common classifiers) and classi fiers that are used for counting discrete entities in groups, the group or collective classifiers," and gives two examples from Burmese, a typi cal classifier language. Unfortunately, he does not discuss group clas sifiers in detail in his study. Matisoff (1973, cited in Becker 1986: 334-335), rightly includes them as simply one subtype of classifier in
Lahu. However, by and large group classifiers, despite some attention, have been little noted or poorly treated in the literature. Chao ( 1968) mixes several different subcategories up within his 'group measures' category. Greenberg ( 1972) discusses classifier expressions in the con text of collectives, and includes many examples of collective nouns,
68
3
• A POD O F WHALES •
but nevertheless fails to mention group classifiers. Lehman ( 1979), following the typology of T'sou ( 1976), matter-of-factly notes the ex istence of group classifiers and remarks that they refer to "power sets" of referents, but unfortunately does not analyze them, and puts them in the same category as measures. In the recent specialist literature on classifiers, group classifiers are almost totally misunderstood, and then dismissed. Tai and Wang (1990: 39) rightly remark, ..... unlike Chinese, English does not have classifiers such as tiao i� for counting fish and ke � for counting trees," but they unfortunately then state, incorrectly, "qim tW in Chi nese is semantically equivalent to group in English." Aikhenvald (2000: 1 1 6), says, "quantifier constructions in English three heads of cattle [sic, for three head of cattle]1 are in fact a subtype of genitive construction," (2000: 1 1 6), and adds, "The same construction type is employed independently whether the measure words just quantify the referent of a noun (as in half of) or contain some reference to arrange ment (as in row of corn)" (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 16 n. 9). Grinevald (2000: 58) lumps group classifiers together with what she calls "meas ure terms of mass nouns," exemplified by the list "a glass of water, a pound of sugar, a slice of bread, a bead of cattle, a herd of callle," but puts others into a second category, "measure/arrangement terms of mass nouns," exemplified by "a pile of books, a group of children, a line of cars, a gaggle of geese (on the ground), a skein of geese (fly ing)."2 To these confused and erroneous analyses may be added the one published article on English classifiers (Lehrer 1986), which mis understands group classifiers in general and includes an unusually large number of incorrect examples. Perhaps 'familiarity breeds con tempt' by speakers of European languages in this case, so that these linguists did not check their data and analyses as carefully as they might have with an Asian or American language. At any rate, it ap pears that due to the assumption classifiers do not-and cannot-exist in European languages functional typologists have largely overlooked their presence in English, Russian, and other European languages.
I.
The English classifier head is not pluralizable when used with caule, but requires
cabbage or lettuce, e.g., a head ofcabbage, ten heads oflettuce, but not •ten head ofletlllce. The classifier is obligatory with lettuce, but not with cabbage: ten cabbages, but not •tefl lettuces. number agreement when used with
2.
Emphasis added to highlight the actual group classifiers.
•
THE G R O U P CLASSIFIER
•
69
3.1 Group Classifiers and Classifier Languages As noted in Chapter Two, it is not possible to convert a pseudopart itive construction with a true group sortal classifier into a partitive construction, as shown in examples (1) through (4) below, unlike with mensural classifier expressions such as a pound of sugar, a slice of cheese, ten rows ofcorn, etc. (l )
a pride oflions, but *a pride ofthe lions
(2)
a pod ofwhales, but *a pod of the whales
(3)
a pack ofwolves, but *a pack ofthe wolves
(4)
a school offish, but *a school ofthefish
The reason is that classifiers refer to whole units. A pride of lions does not refer to a portion of all the lions that exist, it means all the lions that are included in one 'pride'-which normally means only, and specifically, all the lions that are visible in one place. In other words, the group classifier pride refers to all the lions that exist within the boundary of the unit it marks, just as when a singular count noun such as dog is specified for number in English, in a dog, the referent is that which is within the boundaries of the whole unit 'dog'; the same for the plural-dogs refers to individual whole bounded units of the referent in question. The noun targets of an English group classifier are thus bounded by it and constitute a whole, not a part. The referents of group classifiers are, in the main, taxonomic sets of animals. Because English and the selection of other languages discussed in this chapter that have prominent sets of group classifiers also have obligatory or largely obligatory (as in Uzbek) plural number specifica tion, a plural-marked noun has a NUMBER marker and there are no 'morphological receptors' available for an additional number marker, as double marking of number is prohibited in most languages. (For example, in standard English one cannot say *catses, *snakeses, *womens, and so on.3) Therefore, in order to further specify the noun it is necessary to use a PHORONYM. This situation contrasts with that in Mandarin and other 'classifier languages', where there is normally (or obligatorily) no overt plural marking on nouns (Greenberg 1972),
3.
Double pluralization can occur in some languages, e.g. Mongolian.
70
3 • A POD OF WHALES
•
and there are also few or no 'true' group classifiers (i.e., they do not constitute semi-grammaticized or fully grammaticized semantic agree ment systems). The agreement pattern of group classifiers is also distinctive. Within a sentence containing the pseudopartitive construction itself, number agreement is always with the number indicated by the numeral or determiner, as in (5), where the singular verb agrees morphologi cally with the singular classifier herd. But in anapboric reference, as in They in (6), which refers to the herd of goats in (5), the pronoun is always plural. (5)
A herd ofgoats was here yesterday.
(6)
They ate all the grass.
This is clear from examples where the noun is lexically and morphologically unmarked for number (e.g., one sheep vs. three sheep), where the same agreement pattern occurs, as in (7) and (8). (7)
A herd ofsheep was here yesterday.
(8)
They ate all the grass.
The reason for this is that the classifier itself is marked as plural and count. This may be seen also from the Mandarin examples in ( I I ) through ( 16) below.
3.2 Group versus Unit Classifier Systems It is thus ultimately due, evidently, not to the count/mass distinction, but to obligatory overt pi ural marking, that European languages, including English, generally have group classifiers, unlike Asian classifier languages, which have obligatory overt singulative marking, a dichotomy noticed long ago by Greenberg (1972). While the implications for Asian languages (unit classifiers) were obvious to European language speakers, the implications for European languages (group classifiers) have been overlooked. Like unit classifiers, group classifiers occur in pseudopartitive constructions and have the feature of CLASS, i.e., covert but obligatory agreement, the assignment of classifiers to sets containing semanti-
71
• T H E GROUP CLASSIFIER •
cally related nouns.4 Just as with unit classifiers, two types-or more correctly, two extremes on a continuum-may be distinguished, sortal group classifiers and mensural group classifiers. The distinctions and similarities between the two sets, and the fact that it is impossible to draw a clear formal or semantic line between the sortal and mensural types, as shown above for unit classifiers, suggest that from the point of view of noun classification type, it is better to divide classifiers into unit and group classifiers, with a 'fuzzy category' continuum for each, ranging from sortal to mensural extremes. The sortal group classifiers of English categorize mainly accord ing to natural taxonomies, and apply to animals and other animate be ings. They are thus comparable to taxonomic gender classification, which is widespread in European languages. However, the classifiers themselves, where cognitively analyzable, are selected according to salient visual characteristics of the animals as a group-i.e., how they appear to the human observer-or to characteristics of their modes of behavior, whether real or imputed to the animals by humans. For example, the English group classifier herd, used for large her bivorous quadrupeds, refers to their tendency to gather together in a dense mass (unlike aflock); when applied metaphorically to humans, it refers to the same idea, but adds the bovine characteristics of the most typical 'herding' animals, cattle. These and other group classifiers have thus been chosen according to criteria similar to those used to select unit classifiers in East Asian languages, and are used metaphori cally and anaphorically in exactly the same way. They also occur only in pseudopartitive constructions, and are grammatically marked as sortal classifiers, as discussed in Chapter Two and shown in ( I ) to (4). English, Russian, and other European languages tend to have rela tively many group classifiers but few unit classifiers, exactly the op posite of languages which have many unit classifiers but few group classifiers, such as Mandarin and Japanese.s Examples of group classifiers are given in
English
(9) and ( 1 0).
4.
The categories are actually of the real-world referents of the nouns, above. On 'agreement', see Appendix E.
as
5.
No instances of group-classifier-only languages have hitherto been discussed in the literature. It could indeed be true that there are none, if gender markers were considered to be 'classifiers', as in Aikhenvald (2000). If so, this could involve
noted
72
(9)
3
•
A POD OF WHALES •
saw a pack of wolv-es in the forest ISG saw NUMBrscrGCLr,...cKrPSP wolf-NUMB1 1'1.) in the forest 'I saw a pack of wolves in the forest.'
1
beached themselves of whale-s (I 0) A pod NUMB[scrGCL[LARGEsEAMA MMALStPSP whale-NUMB[PLJ beached themselves ' A pod of whales beached themselves.'6
In Mandarin there is no obvious difference between unit classifiers and group classifiers because neither number nor the count-mass distinction is usually formally marked on nouns.7 However, a clear difference appears in anaphoric agreement, as it does in English. Proforms referring to an NP with a singular unit classifier are singular, while proforms referring to an NP with a singular group classifier are plural. For example, consider the Mandarin sentences in (1 1) through (13) and (14) through (1 6). If the question uses a plu ral pronoun, as in ( 12), the reference is to the group classifier qun GCLI+ANIM ATE)• but if it uses a singular pronoun, as in (13), the referent cannot be the group classifier; it must be some other person or thing not included in the immediate context. Similarly, in (16) the referent is understood to be the singular subject of the statement as a whole in example ( 14). (II) gtingcai you yi qim qiangdao zai deng nl just.then exist I GCL[+ANJMATE) robber CONTIN wait 2SG 'Just now there was a gang of robbers waiting for you'. ( 12) /omen qu nali? 3PL go where 'Where did they go?' ( 13)
/Q qii noli 3SG go where 'Where did he/she/it go?'
an implicational universal that is not yet apparent. However, I have not encountered any languages that have unit classifiers exclusively. 6.
This example is from a newspaper photograph caption, "A pod of whales beached tlhemselves on Cape Cod yesterday." (I have unfortunately lost the clipping and reference.) Note the correct plural number agreement vs. the ill formed •a pod ofwhales beached itself
7.
Plural marking on personal pronouns is obligatory. Cf. Appendix Bon the use of the same Mandarin marker (-men) as a [+HUMAN] plural number marker suffix with some nouns referring to humans.
• THE GROUP CLASSIFIER •
73
(14) wo shfishu difile yi qun
yang l SG uncle lost one GCL[+ ANIMATE] sheep 'My uncle lost a herd of sheep.'
(15) /amen zenme-le? 3PL how-PRF 'What happened to them (i.e., the sheep)?' ( 16) ta zenme-le? 3SG how-PRF 'What happened to him (i.e., the uncle)?' or, 'What's the matter with him (i.e., the uncle)?' The distinction in number between group classifier and unit classifier is clear from examples (13) and (16), where the singular pronoun refers to a participant entirely outside of the pseudopartitive construction. This anaphorical difference arises from the fact that group classifiers refer to a group of discrete units, not an undifferentiated mass. Group classifiers are thus clearly distinct from measures (or 'mensural classifiers'), with which they are regularly confused in the literature, as noted above. Number constitutes the only distinction between group and unit classifiers in Mandarin. The fact that this grammatical difference between sortal group classifiers and unit mensural classifiers is mirrored precisely in the English glosses emphasizes the sharp divide between the two types. In view of the overwhelming attention paid by linguists to Eng lish, the most heavily studied language in the world, it is strange that English group classifiers have been overlooked as classifiers. When specifying a 'group' of animals in English it is grammatically obliga tory to use a pseudopartitive construction with the correctly agreeing group classifier, usually in the singular, in the pseudopartitive case. Consider examples (17) and (18). (17)
We watched a school of minnow-s. l PL watched NUMB[so]-GCL[mutPSP minnow-NUMB[rL] 'We watched a school of minnows.'
(18) *We watched a
school of sheep. l PL watched NUMB[soJ-GCL[m11rPSP sheep-NUMB[n] *'We watched a school of sheep.'
To correct the ill-formed example in (18), one of two terms must be used, namely, flock , the group· classifier for birds and sheep, or herd, the group classifier for large, gregarious herbivorous mammals. The
74
3 • A POD OF WHALES •
classifier flock is more likely to be used for sheep that are scattered loosely about an area, while herd is more likely to be used to refer to animals that are more closely packed together (as when being herded by a shepherd), or in connection with their ownership (for which flock would normally not be used). Correct choice of these terms may be taken by native speakers of English as an indication of linguistic performance level. Although some usage differences are dialect based,8 in standard American English a speaker who uses group 'GCL[HuMAN) ·� for sheep, or for any of the other well-known animate creatures covered by a specific group classifier, is a substandard or non-native speaker. This does not, of course, apply to non-classifYing phoronyms such as bunch, lot, and so forth, which in colloquial American English are widely used in the pseudopartitive constructions a bunch ofand a lot ofto form simple quantifiers. In Finnish,10 the head noun (N2) in group classifier pseudopartitive phrases is in the partitive plural for count nouns, as shown in (19), while in mensural classifier phrases the head (N2) is in the partitive singular, as in (20).
( 19) katras
/ampaita
GC4suEEP. cloLooE.'IJ·NOM.SG sheep PART. PL .
'a flock of sheep'
olutta (20) lasi glass.NOM.SG beer.PART.SG 'a glass. of beer' Although it is of course always possible to substitute a general, non classifying phoronym, such as bunch, for a specific one, as may be done in practically all languages with classifiers, it is ungrammatical to use specific group classifiers with the wrong semantic classes in English, as in example ( 18). This constraint is identical to the
8.
Speakers from large urban areas may use fewer classifiers than other speakers, especially for unfamiliar animals. However, no empirical study has been done to test this observation or, indeed, any hypothesis involving group classifiers.
9.
The group classifier group is used not only for humans but also for things (including animals) that have been arranged or 'grouped' by humans.
10. The parlitive case marks the target or semantic head noun (N2) in pseudoparlitive
constructions in Finnish. See Chapter Two. It also has many other uses in Finnish that are not relevant to the present study and are not discussed here.
•
75
THE GROUP CLASSIFIER •
constraints on sortal unit classifier usage in English and in Asian classifier languages. By contrast, Mandarin qun 'GCL[+ANIMATE)' is used with any collection of animals or humans; it is not equivalent to group 'GCL[HuMA�
I I. The use of bunch as a group classifier for flowers, a near synonym of bouquet, is completely distinct from that of its quantifier sense, where it is a near-synonym of lot, but even vaguer in sense. When referring to flowers, bunch be ambiguous.
can
therefore
3
76
• A POD OF WHALES •
languages, English included, require classifiers in some instances. Since even the most stereotypical Asian classifier language does not require classifiers in all instances, the idea of a classifier language is obviously in need of revision. See further in Chapters Four and Eight.
3.3 English Group Classifiers Ignoring the very interesting but obsolete or purely literary English group classifiers-which are, perversely, received much attention (Lipton
the only ones to have
1991; Collings I 993}---one is faced
with a good number of words which do in fact classifY nouns.12 English group classifiers seem to fall into two general semantic categories, animate and inanimate, with the animate predominating by far, as seen in Table
1, which gives a selection of the most frequent
sortal group classifiers current today in colloquial speech and literary usage.13 Some usages current as recently as the nineteenth century, such as
herd for
whales (Collings
1993: 124), alongside pod, are now
archaic or obsolete, at least in standard American English. 14 Table
1.
English sortal group classifiers
WELL-FORMED ajlockof a herd of a pride of a
pod of school of a swarm of a
apack of a
gang of
a band of
birds; sheep; parishioners cattle, sheep, elephants, other large herbivores lions whales, porpoises, seals fiSh bees, other insects wolves, dogs; thieves; submarines; lies thieves, hoodlums. laborers Gypsies
12. Lipton's book includes the most frequently used classifiers. Collings focuses on the history of actual group classifiers-which he terms 'collective nouns' or 'company nouns'-and takes pains to cite sources attesting to their use. 13.
Most are selected from Lipton (1991).
14. Collings ( 1993: 124) also mentions "a school of whales" but does not cite any source for it. The usage is incorrect in standard American English.
•
T H E G R O U P CLAS S I F I E R
a bevy of a hand of a bunch of a fleet of a set of aflight of a bouquet of a grove of
girls, beauties bananas, cards grapes, bananas ships china, sterling, books stairs flowers trees
*aflock of *a herd of *a pod of *a pack of *a pride of *a school of *a swarm of
cattle, elephants fish, pigeons, wolves sharks, elephants, wolves whales, sharks, bees tigers, thieves, parishioners whales, sheep, birds birds, wolves, lions
•
77
ILL-FORMED
Many, perhaps the majority, of English words that have been treated as collective nouns are sortal group classifiers with specific attribu tions-for example, litter, used for the young of multiparous animals -or mensural group classifiers, such as batch, used for a collection of things cooked, manufactured, or otherwise produced by humans. A group classifier not only marks a noun as a plural subset (its NUMBER function), it refers to the noun's category (its CLASS func tion)-for example, pack, used of canines, and fl ock, used of sheep and birds. By metaphoric extension, pack is also used for thieves and submarines, while flock is similarly also used for parishione rs, who are in the care of a pastor. These examples of metaphorical extension are parallel to the well-known examples of Dyirbal noun class markers (Dixon 1982; Lakoff 1987) and Japanese classifier categories (Down ing 1 996; Lakoff 1986, 1 987). Moreover, unlike invented English ex amples (Lipton 1991), which are used in the same way grammatically, group classifiers do not add much qualifying information to their noun referents (except in metaphoric usage); like unit classifiers, they im plicitly classify them-in most cases, taxonomically. Group classifiers in English are restricted largely to animate nouns. Of the classifiers for inanimates, grove (for trees) and pack (for gum and cigarettes) may be interpreted differently. If trees and other plants were classed as animate (this would be highly unusual because English pronouns class plants, including even plants with known gen der, as neuter), the only irregularity among the group classifiers cited
78
3 • A POD OF WHALES •
here would be pack. Several informants provided the examples wolves, gum, and c igar ettes as nouns counted with pack. When referring to produce pack might seem to be a mensural group classifier (of the 'container' variety). Yet it is also true that both sticks of gum and cigarettes are long, thin things, and most other things packed into packages are not counted in 'packs'. The word pack when referring to canines, however, does not really refer to the physical appearance of the animals together (though that might be a factor as well), but pri marily to their taxonomy as canines. It would appear that by referring to them as a pack we do not know significantly more or less about them, but the metaphorical transfer of the classifier pack from wolv es to thieves and other criminals indicates recategorization of the latter as wolves, which are traditionally viewed as rapacious animals. When used metaphorically for humans (or by further extension, submarines), the classifier pack thus refers to the kinesthetic image schema (Lakoff 1986, 1987; Johnson 1987) of a pack of wolves, which attacks and 'robs' or kills victims. This is typical of the metaphoric word-play which has been widely discussed (e.g., Lakoff 1986, 1987) in connec tion with unit classifiers in other languages, for example Burmese (Becker 1986), and explains the ease of creation of new classifiers, whether accidentally or deliberately, in English (Collings 1993, Lipton 1991 ). Yet in fact, there is only one word, pack, the group classifier for both the animals and the inanimate objects. This is exactly parallel to spoken Mandarin, in which tiao, the usual unit classifier for long, slender, non-rigid things (including ropes and towels) is also the clas sifier for dogs (depending on dialect), fish, snakes, and other animals, while zhi, the usual unit classifier for long, slender rigid things (in cluding pens and pencils), is also the classifier for dogs (again, de pending on dialect), cats, tigers, mice, and other animals. The fact that English sortal group classifiers have for centuries been a recognized lexical and grammatical category-though not a well understood one-supports their identification as a sortal group classifier system. The question of sortal unit classifiers in English is more difficult. Most-but not all-English count nouns are marked lexically as count. In the case of head, as in example (21), the phoro nym follows the expected pattern for a sortal unit classifier. (21) ten head of collie I 0 UC4c.um)"PPS cattle.PL 'ten head of cattle'
• THE GROUP CLAS S I F I E R •
79
Aikhenvald (2000: 116) actually gives "three heads of cattle" as an example of a classifier-like phrase in English, which she says is not a classifier language. Though the example is incorrect, u it really should be heads, because in normal English pseudopartitive constructions the phoronym itself is overtly marked for number, as is any count noun in a pseudopartitive construction along with it. The morphological form of the classifier head in this expression is therefore a clear exception to the rule for English. (In fact, it seems to be the only exception. Perhaps it is necessary that the phoronym be marked for number in order for the head noun to be specified for number: since head is not so marked, the nouns i t specifies also cannot take number marking. See the examples below.) The unit classifier for domestic animals, head, is homonymous with head, a free count noun meaning 'the head (body-part) of an animal or human'. The distinction is exactly the ' same as that between Mandarin t6 u 'UCL[ooMiiSTic ANIMALs] and t6u 'the head (body-part) of an animal or human'. The same is true for many other languages, including Russian, Turkish, and Uzbek, whether classifier languages or not. All other English phoronyms require specification--e.g., piece-s in two pieces offurniture and sheet-s in
three sheets ofpaper. Nevertheless, these instances are not 'measure' (or simple geni tive or partitive) expressions. As noted in Chapter Two, the phoronym piece here does not refer to identical discrete units (say, chairs, only) or to portions (i.e., broken pieces of discrete units) of a homogeneous whole, but to whole discrete items belonging to the referent noun fur niture. Similarly, paper actually comes only in sheets (though some sheets may be very large, size is of little importance in classifier selec tion). The phoronym sheet can be used for other things that have been processed so as to be saliently flat like paper, such as steel-a sheet of steel and so forth. In addition, the classifier sheet (as distinguished from the noun sheet, which refers only to 'bed sheets' in American English) is sortal semantically,. but mensural in that it can take limited adjective insertion; there is thus straddles the fuzzy boundary between the two main types of classifier. The difficulty of identifying the clas sifier subcategory in this case is paralleled by the equivalent classifiers in Japanese (mai) and Mandarin (zhang), which are similarly used for -
15.
She gives a correct example on the preceding page (Aikhenvald 2000: I 15)
80
3 • A POD OF WHALES •
saliently flat things. In all three languages these classifiers refer to units, not groups. The difficulty in categorizing them is only in deter mining whether or not they are sortal or mensural, a distinction that is itself fuzzy at best. In Mandarin, adjective insertion is not allowed with
zhang,
a sortal unit classifier. English
sheet
can take adjective
insertion, making it fonnally a mensural unit classifier though it is nevertheless very clearly a sortal classifier semantically, as shown in Chapter Two. Perhaps further study will reveal the constraints in volved. Note that while piece can take adjective insertion with pa per-a big piece of paper- it cannot do so with furniture- *a big piece offurniture-indicating that piece is a mensural unit classifier with paper and a sortal unit classifier with furn iture}6 Group classifiers, as a particular subtype of phoronym, have the primary function of marking an indetenninate plurality of countable things, usually animate beings. Reference and anaphora in the Manda rin sentences given in examples (II) through (16) above clarifies that the group classifier phrase is plural. The same is true of English, as shown by the examples in
(5) through (8) and ( l 0) above. English
obligatorily marks plural on most plural nouns, but it is notable that many of the most frequently occurring nouns which are not them selves overtly marked for plurality are animal terms, such as sheep and
deer.
The usage of hunters is revealing in this regard. It is normal for
hunters to omit the plural number suffix on the head noun in group classifier phrases referring to otherwise countable target animals such as
elephant in a herd of elephant.
Greenberg (1972: 291) consid
ers this to be "what might be called a miniature system of collec tive/singulative" in English, but the non-marking of pluralization is partly a result of the fact that indefinite plurality is marked by the group classifier. This is clear because it is necessary to specify single animals even in hunters' speech. For example, a hunter might say,
went out to hunt bear.
We
If more than one animal was killed the target
noun is understood with a plural sense, though no number specifica
I bagged two elephant. However, it is necessary to say, I bagged an elephant, not *I bagged elephant, for a hunter who killed tion is used:
16.
The word for 'furniture' in other languages can be count; e.g., Finnish kaksi huonekalua 2.NOM fumitures' ).
furniture.PART.SG
'two
pieces of Furniture'
(lit.,
'two
81
• T H E G R O U P CLASS I F I E R •
one animal. While the possibility exists that this special usage reflects archaic speech styles, 17 it would appear more likely that it reflects treatment of the animals as game-i.e., as meat 'on the hoof, food to be killed and eaten. American farmers often say, "I raise pork," or
"I
raise beef," and when grazing animals are counted with the classifier
head, they are obligatorily unmarked, e.g., ten head of horse, not *ten head of horses. Several basic animal terms-cattle, sheep, swine, and deer-appear at first glance to be collectives and unspecified for num ber, but of these
sheep, swine,
and
deer are
actually count nouns that
cattle many cattle, not *much cattle).
are lexically both singular and plural, while like people (e.g.,
is lexically plural,
English group classifier classes are partly based on salient charac teristics of the physical distribution of the animals classed. For exam ple, sheep being herded by someone are a
herd; they naturally occur as
a flock (which is perceived as being more widely spaced), and are classed together with birds. But in general the classes of the everyday, actually used (or at least widely known) classifiers are based on folk taxonomy, not on visual chara<:teristics. This is clear because discrete classes in English take different group classifiers even though the in dependent denotations of the dassifiers are not necessarily logically connected to their respective nouns, though they may once have been. For example, the ordinary group classifier for fish in standard Ameri can English,
shoal
school,
is a variant of an earlier word that has become
in modern English (Lipton 1991: 19), but no etymology really
explains its use as a group classifier.18
3.4 Russian Classifiers The English group classifier system is paralleled structurally by that of Russian, but the classes are different, as seen in Table
2. The table is
intended to convey an idea of the semantic ranges of the most frequent Russian group classifiers. Their form (the qualified noun in the
17. It is also common to hear farmers and constructi on workers use unpluralized measures, such as two fool rather than twofeel. 18. Collings does not even mention the generic word fish in his discussion of school (Collings 1993: 136). See above on other differences between American and British classifier usage.
3 •
82
A POD OF WHALES •
genitive plural) is superficially similar to that of English group classifiers. Table 2. Russian sortal group classifiers
WELLFORMED
staja kosjak svora sajka tabun otara stado roj tolpa kuca klin
volkov 'wolves•, ptic 'birds' (e.g., kuropatok 'grouse', /ebedej 'swans'), ryb 'fish' ryb 'fish', de/finov 'dolphins', kitov 'whales';plic 'birds' (only
when flying together)' goncix 'hounds.', sobak 'dogs', volkov 'wolves'; metaphori cally, vorov 'thieves', banditov 'bandits' 19 vorov 'thieves', banditov 'bandits', rebjatisek 'children, kids', ma/'Cisek 'little boys' /osadej 'horses' ovec 'sheep' korov 'cattle', ovec 'sheep'. s/onov 'elephants', olonej 'dee r'
,
other large non-carnivorous land animals pce/ 'bees', os 'wasps', mux 'flies', komarov 'mosquitoes' /jude} 'people, korov 'cattle', ovec 'sheep', /osadej 'horses', oslov 'donkeys' /jude} 'people' ptic 'birds', especially utok 'ducks' or lebedej 'swans', but only when flying in formation lLLFORMED
*svora korov 'a pack of cattle' *tabun ovec 'a herd of sheep' *otara slonov 'a flock of elephants' *stado kuropatok 'a herd of grouse' Russian classifiers occur in pseudopartitive constructions. Unlike English, Russian has full concord of the Indo-European fusional type, in which the inflectional endings are portmanteau morphemes marking case, number (singular or plural), and gender. Also unlike English, Russian specifies sin gu lar indefinite nouns with a zero marker. Con sider examples
(22) through (24).
19. The group classifier svora has a strong negative connotation to it, suggesting that the animals are indecent, dirty, or the like.
THE GROUP CLASSIFIER
•
korov
(22) stado GCL[LARGE LANo .,AM.,ALSJ·NOM.NEUT
83
•
paslos'
cow.GEN.PL. FEM graze
v pole
in field.SG.NEUT 'A herd of cattle
was
grazing
in
the field. '
za/jubovalsja na dva
(23) on
3SG.MASC was.admiring at two.NOM.PL.MASC kosjaka
utok
letjascix
najug
GCL[nsn. 01Ros]·GEN.PL.MASC
duck.GEN.PL.FEM flying.PL.MASC to south 'He was admiring two flights of ducks flying south.'
(24) on
vide/
nedaleko ot
3SG.MASC saw.SG.MASC nolfar kucu
goroda
from town.GEN.SG.MASC
/judej
GCL[ uuMANsJ
people.GEN.PL.MASC 'He saw a group of people not far from town.'
In addition to sortal group classifiers, Russian also has sortal unit clas sifiers. As Aikhenvald (2000: 120-121) and earlier Greenberg
( 1972: 289) have pointed out, the word ce/ovek 'person'20 can optionally be used with numerals bigger than 'four' to count humans in a canonical classifier expression, as in (25). The same sense can also be expressed in two other ways, either
pjat' detej five
child.GEN.PL 'five children'
or pjatero21 detej five.COLL.HUMAN child.GEN.PL 'five children'.
(25) pat ' celovek j
detej
five UCL[nUMAN] child.GEN.PL 'five children'
20.
Aikhenvald translates celovek as 'people', saying it is the genitive plural form of 'man'. Actually, ce/ovek has the same form in the nominative singular and genitive plural. It is usually used in the everyday sense of 'man, person', but also in the abstract sense of 'Man, mankind, the human race'. In
the genitive plural
it
means 'men, individual s, persons', not 'people' in the collective sense. The collective plural 'people' is expressed in Russian with a lexically plural root,
/judi
'people', which in the genitive case is ljudej 'people's'.
2 1 . The collective numerals, which can only be used to count humans or anthropomorphic animals, are dvoe 'two (of them)', /roe 'three', cetvero 'four', pjatero five', sestero 'six', semero 'seven', vosemero 'eight', devjatero 'nine', and desjatero 'ten'. However, the last three forms are archaic. For 'eight (of them)', people today normally say vos'merom; devjaterom 'nine' and desjaterom •
'ten' are rarely used. In any event, the collective numerals in modem Russian go no higher than ten.
84
3
•
A POD OF WHALES
•
As a classifier, celo vek 'person' can specify all nouns referring to humans, such as student (genitive plural st udentov) 'student', so ldat (genitive plural so ldat) 'soldier', k restj anin (genitive plural krestjan) 'peasant', and even in former times /judi 'people', which is lexically plural, as in (26). The expression pjat' c elovek /jude} is redundant; clearly, ce/ovek is (or was) used semantically and syntactically as a classifier.22 This usage is now obsolete; the usual way of saying 'five people' in Russian today is simply pjat' c e/ovek.23
(26) pjat' celovek /jude} five UCLJ11u.,AN] people.GEN.PL 'five people' There are several other interesting Russian sortal unit classifiers. Consider the examples in (27) through (33).
(27) sem' golov skota Seven UCL[uEAoj·GEN.PL.FEM cattle.GEN.COLL 'seven head of cattle' {28) golovka cesnoka tu u>tj·NOM.SG.FEM garlic.GEN.MASC UCL[... 'a bulb of garlic' luka (29) golovka UCL[AtliUM)·NOM.SG.FEM onion.GEN.PL.MASC 'an onion '
(30)
kocan24 sa/ata UCL Jc...ae...cE. LETTUCE)·NOM.SG.MASC lettuce.GEN.SG.FEM 'a head of lettuce'
(31)
vilok kapusty UCLJc...ae...cE]·NOM.SG .MASC cabbage.GEN .SG .MASC 'a head of cabbage'
(32)
kluben kartoski UCLJpor...roESJ potato.GEN.PL.FEM 'a potato' ··
22. See Greenberg ( 1972: 289) for discussion of early Russian forms of this type. 23. The genitive plural and nominative singular form.s of celovek are identical. Some provincial Russian speakers did not object to its u.se as a classifier.
24. While kocan can be freely used for both cabbage and lettuce, vilok is supposed to be used only for cabbage. However, some people use it for lettuce too.
• THE GROUP CLASSIFIER •
85
karJoski
(33) dva klubnja
two UCL[PorAroES]·GEN.PL potato GEN PL.FEM 'two potatoes' .
.
Although use of kluben UCL[POTAroEs] is optional-for example, one can '
say e ith er kartoska potato.NOM.SG.FEM 'a potato' or dve kartoski
2
potato.GEN.PL.fEM 'two potatoes'-it is a clear ex ampl e of a sortal unit classifier both syntactically and semantically. In fact, both kocan and
vilok, the classifiers for heads of cabbage or lettuce, refer t o round
shaped things, and can only be used as classifiers. While most of the
best examples of Russian sortal unit classifiers are optional, the sortal group classifiers are obligatorily used with their assigned nouns. There are in addition many mensural phoronyms, some of which appear to be mensural classifiers. A detaile d study of classifiers and other pho ronyms in Russian is a great desideratum.
3.5 Hungarian Classifiers Hungarian has a small set of classifiers that are typologically identical,
both structurally and semantically, to classifiers in East Asian languages (Beckwith 1992b). It is interesting that although it has both sortal unit classifiers and sortal group classifiers, there are only a few group classifiers, which do not constitute as complete a system as in English, or even Russian. Consider the sortal group classifiers in
Table 3. The examples are glossed
as
plural in English, but they are
singular in Hungarian, in which language plural is overtly marked,
e.g., szo/6 'grape', szo/Ot 'grapes'. Table 3. Hungarian group classifiers
csoport
ember 'people', diak 'students', munkas 'workers', e.g., egy csoport ember 'a group of people'. Used only for humans; now generally considered to be more literary than csapat in
csapat
ember 'people', gyerek 'children', varju 'crows', e.g., egy csa pat varju 'a flock of crows'. Used only with live animate be ings; more colloquial than csoport.
the standard language.
86
3 • A
csomo
fa/ka
fort koteg
POD OF WHALES
•
zoldseg 'vegetables', haj 'hair', hagyma 'onions', e.g., harom csomo hagyma 'three bunches of onions (tied together)'.
Used for inanimates only.2S kutya 'dogs'. Used exclusively for dogs and wolves, e.g., egy falka kutya 'a jpack of dogs', but also applied metaphorically to humans. szolo 'grapes'. Used for clusters of grapes and other berries, e.g., egy fort szolo 'a bunch of grapes'. penz 'banknotes'. Used for sheaves of hay as well as for wrapped bundles of magazines, banknotes, newspapers, etc.; for example, harom koteg penz 'three packs of banknotes'.
While most nouns in Hungarian do not require-and cannot take sortal unit classifiers, in some cases classifiers are obligatory. For example, when counting individual grapes, it is obligatory to use szem, ' a noun meaning 'eyeball' and also a classifier, 'UCL[sMALL sPHERICAL) , which is used for small edible seeds, fruits, potatoes, and so on, for example in harom szem szo/6 three UCL[sMALL SPHERICAL) grape 'three grapes' . Despite their restricted distribution in the language, these are true sortal unit classifiers. Consider the examples in Table 4. Table 4. Hungarian sortal unit classifiers fej szem
hagyma 'onion', kaposzta 'cabbage', and satata 'lettuce', as in egyfej salata ' a head of lettuce'. szolo 'grape', szilva 'plum', mag 'seed', briza 'grain of wheat', mak 'poppy seed', bab 'bean', and krumpli 'potato', as in harom szem krumpli 'three potatoes szolo 'grape• , as in egy to szo7o 'a grapevine• ; used also for •.
to
rose and berry bushes. szal
,
virag '(cut) flower' szalma 'straw rozsa 'rose. gyertya 'can' ' ' dle' as in egy szal gyertya 'one -candle'.
'
Hungarian classifiers are used in canonical pseudopartitive constructions, as shown in the sentences employing group classifiers given in examples (34) through (36) and those with unit classifiers given in examples (37) through (39); cf. the examples in Chapter Two.
25. The classifier csomo is more frequently used as an indefinite quantifier,
approximately equivalent to bunch in English. For example, egy csomo ember 'a bunch of people', or egy csomo'kaVIil kiontellem '·I spilled a lot of coffee.' This is a clear example of a fuzzy category.
• THE GROUP CLASSIFIER •
(34)
Vasaro/j harom csomo
87
hagymat!
buy three GCL[nUNcn] onion.ACC 'Please buy three bunches of onions!' (35) Egy fa/ka
kutya Uldozte
a
rokat.
one GCL[c.um<Es] dog was.chasing DEF fox .ACC 'A pack of dogs was running after the fox.'
(36) Adj nekem egy fort
szolot!
give me one GCL[nusm] grape.ACC 'Give me a bunch of grapes1' (37) Kerek
ket fej
satatat.
necessary two UCL[RoUNoveaETADLES] 'Give me two heads of lettuce.' (38)
(39)
lettuce.ACC
krump/it. Vegye/ harom szem three UCL[sMA LL •ouNn EDIBLES] potato.ACC 'Take three potatoes.'
take
Vettem
harom szal
rozsat.
bought. l SG three UCL[LoNaTlnNJ rose.ACC 'I have bought three roses.' Hungarian also has many interesting class nouns. As in Tibetan, class noun constructions are used instead of classifier constructions for most collections of animals that would take classifiers in English, Russian, or Uzbek. For example, egy disznokonda (diszno 'pig' + konda 'CLT[sw111e1') 'a herd of pigs' (in archaic English, a sounder of swine). Other class terms used to fonn similar group class nouns are csorda 'CLT[oov 111esJ' , used only for herds of bovine animals, menes 'CLT1eou��<es1', used only for herds of horses and other equines, and nytij 'CLT1sueeP, vo"rs1', used only for sheep and goats. These class tenns are purely taxonomic.
3.6 Finnish Classifiers The colloquial Finnish language is the classic example of a language that is said to have no grammaticized noun classification system what soever (Hurskainen 200 I ; Beckwith 1992b: 203 ), as is widely believed to be the case with Uralic languages in general (Aikhenvald 2000: 440; Dixon 1986: I 09). However, this belief is unfounded. Finnish has an obligatory group classifier system similar to those in other European languages, as shown in Table 5, and a limited sortal unit
88
3
•
A POD OF WHALES
•
classifier system as well. In nearly all instances class nouns-such as
kalaparvi (k ala
'fish' +
parvi
CLT[FLYING oR swiMMING ANIMALs])
'a school of
fish'-are alternatives; in some instances they are preferred, as in
tyttoparvi (ty tt6 'girl' + parv i) 'a
bevy of girls'. In many instances the
full classifier expression is preferred when counting quantities greater than one. Finnish classifiers are
particularly interesting because
Finnish has a distinctive morphological case, the partitive, which is used in pseudopartitive constructions, as discussed in Chapter Two.
Table 5. Group classifiers in Finnish for sheep, as in katras lampaista GCL[snEEP. cmLoaiN)·NOM.SG sheep.PART.PL 'a flock of sheep', or kaksi katrasta lampaita 2.nom GCL[SilEEP, cmLoRIN]·PART.SG sheep.PART.PL •two flocks of sheep'; and. children, as in iso katras /apsia big.NOM.SG GCL[snEEP, clnLoREN]· NOM.SG children.PART.PL 'a big flock of children'. for flying or swimming animals, specifically birds, as in parvi parvi rastaita 'a flock of starlings' or parvi hanhia 'a fl!ock/gaggle of geese', flying insects, as in parvi hyttysiii 'a swarm of mosquitoes', and bats (parvi lepakkoja); fish and other sea creatures, as in parvi kaloja 'a school of fish' and parvi valaita 'a pod of whales'; and metaphorically for girls and for people in general. lauma for land mamma ls-e.g., cattle (lauma karjaa)/6 horses (/au rna hevosia), moose (lauma hirviii), deer, sheep, dogs, wolves, lions, monkeys, etc.-and metaphoricany, people, as in lauma ihmisiii, which can have the negative connota tion of 'a herd of people' or the positive connotation of 'a flock of people' (in the Christian pastoral sense). for reindeer only, as in kaksi tokkaa poroja 'two herds of reintokka deer', or porotokka 'a reindeer herd'. joukko for humans, as in joukko ihmisiii 'a crowd of people', joukko sotilaita 'a troop of soldiers', joukko varkaita 'a band of thieves'. joukkio for humans, including :soldiers, like joukko, but with a pejora tive connotation, as injoukkio varkaita 'a pack of thieves'.
katras
26. The word karja 'cattle' is semantically plural,
as
in English, but grammatically
singular; louma ka�jaa is parsed GCL[MAMMAL)·NOM.SG cattle.PART.SG. 'a herd of cattle'; however, the class noun karjalauma 'id.' is preferred.
•
THE
89
G R O U P CLAS S I F I E R •
jengi
for thieves, bandits, etc., as in kop/a varkoita 'a pack of thieves'; the class noun varaskopla 'id.' is preferred. for hoodlums, gangsters, youths, as in jengi nuoria 'a gang of
ryhmii
for groups of people and inanimate objects that have been
kop/a
youths'.
pesue
terttu
grouped by people, as in ryhmi:i kirjoja 'a group ofbooks'. for groups of young mammals (including children) in a den or nest, as in pesue kettuja 'a den of foxes'; the class noun ket tupesue 'id.' is preferred. for bunches of grapes, berries, and some flowers, as in kaksi terttua mustaviinimarjoja 'two bunches ofblackcurrents'.
The fact that there is a group classifier solely for reindeer, a singularly important animal in subarctic regions, is reminiscent of the unique unit classifier for elephants in Thai (q.v. Chapter Seven). The case marking of an unqualified pseudopartitive construct ion (NUMERAL - PHORONYM - NOUN) in Finnish is given in Figure 9. A phoronym or noun directly qualified by a numeral is always in the par titive singular case in Finnish. NUMERAL (nominative or oblique case) - PHORONYM (partitive singular case) -
NOUN
(partitive plural case for
count nouns, partitive singular
case
for
mass nouns). Figure 9. Case marking in Finnish pseudopartitive constructions
Like its Finno-Ugric relative Hungarian, Finnish also has a number of unit classifiers, shown in Table 6. Table 6. Unit classifiers in Finnish
pii ii
kerii jyvii
for beads of cabbage, as in kaksi piiiitii kaalia two.NOM UCL[uEAo]·PART.SG cabbage.PART.PL 'two heads of cabbage', or kaksi kaa/in-piiiitii two.NOM cabbage-CLT[uEAo]·PART.SG cabbage.PART.PL 'id.', or simply kaksi kaa/ia two.NOM cab bage.PART.PL. 'two cabbages'. For rutabagas one must use either a class noun, as in kaksi nauriinpiiiitii 'two rutabagas', or the bare noun, as in kaksi naurista 'id.' .27 for beads of cabbage and lettuce (e.g., kaksi kerii ii sa/aattia 'two heads of lettuce' or salatinkerii 'id.'); and balls of yam. for grains of sand and for wheat, rice, and other grains, as in kaksi jyviiii hie/dcaa two.NOM UCL[cRAIN]·PART.SG sand.PART
27. Finnish piiii is cognate to Hungarianfej 'head'; see above.
90
3
kide kynsi arkki
•
A POD OF WHALES
•
.SG 'two grains of sand'; in the singular, only the clas s noun is available: hiekanjyvii 'a grain of sand'. for crystals or ·grains' of sugar and salt, as in kaksi kidettii sokeria 'two crystals of sugar' and kaksi kideflii suolaa 'two grains of salt' .28 for cloves of garlic, as in kynsi vaJkosipu/ia •a clove of garlic'. for sheets of paper, as in kaksi arkkia paperia two.NOM UCL[sum]·PART.SG paper.PART.SG 'two sheets of paper'.
Both Finnish and Hungarian have a small number of sortal unit classifiers, most of which are inherited etymologically from Proto Finno-Ugric. This shows the protolanguage had a classifier system.29 As noted above, treating mass nouns for food or drink as count nouns in Finnish does not convey the meaning of a 'kind' o f the target, but only a 'unit' or 'order (as in a restaurant)'. For example, kaksi olutta 2.NOM.SG beer.PART.SG 'two beers' means only 'two orders of beer' (e.g., mugs, bottles, glasses, whatever is customary). To explic itly signify two 'kinds', 'brands', etc., of beer it is necessary to use either kahta o/utta 2.PART.SG beer.PART.SG or a compound adjective formed from kaksi 'two' and the adjective ending -/ainen, as in (40).
(40) Haluaisin kahdenlaista olut/a would.like.l SG two.GEN.SG-kind.PART.SG beer. PART.SG 'I'd like two (different) beers.'
3.7 Uzbek Group Classifiers In Uzbek, nouns must be specified in order to be counted. Unit specification can be accomplished either by a numeral plus classifier or other phoronym or by the non-classifying phoronym suffix -ta, which is added directly to the numeral. Group classifiers include those in Table 7. There seem to be two subcategories of Uzbek group classifiers, GCL[+ANIMATE) and GCL(-ANIMAn)· It is notable that toda 'pack' can optionally take the plural suffix -Jar, while gurux 'group' requires it. The use of pluralization with Uzbek classifiers is in need of further study.
28. Note that the head nouns hiekka 'sand', sakeri 'sugar', and suo/a
'salt' are in the
partitive singular form because they are mass nouns in Finnish. 29.
All of the Hungarian unit classifiers in Table 4 are inherited words.
•
THE G R O U P CLASSIFIER •
91
Table 7. Group classifiers in Uzbek gala
Used for flocks of birds and packs of wolves, e.g., bir gala cumcuk 'a flock of sparrows', bir gala qus ' a flock of birds'.
piida
For herds of domestic land animals, excluding pets, e.g., bir
suruw
pada at 'a herd of horses' . For larger herds of domestic cattle (mal) than those classified
It may also be used metaphorically for humans.
by pada, but actually restricted to qoy 'sheep' and icki 'goats') for example bir suruw qoy 'a herd of sheep'.
toda
Used for fish, e.g., bir toda bdliq a school of fish', and for wolves and other predatory groups of animals and humans, •
e.g., bir toda bori 'a pack of wolves'. It is also used for hon eybees, e.g., bir toda asalari 'a swarm of honeybees' (but note the plural suffix -far and the possessive suffix -i).
gurux
For groups of humans, including among others yaslar 'youths (lit., 'young ones')', infinirlar 'engineers', etc. The class -
specifically excludes gender-denoting nouns, and the noun is always plural, e.g., bir gurux adamlar 'a group of people' .
dasta
For bouquets or bunches of gut 'flowers' or sac 'hair', e.g., bir
bag
For bunches
sada
For strings of pearls, beads, coins, etc., e.g., bir siida marwarid 'a string of pearls' .
dasta sac, 'a handful ofhair' (referring to a girl's hair). of long, thin, non-flowering plants such as leeks, green onions, etc., e.g., bir bag kok piydz 'a bunch of green onions'.
An Uzbek group classifier may put a duplicate in the numeral slot to
form a non-specific plural, or, to look at it another way, the classifier can be reduplicated to indicate indefinite plurality, e.g., gala 'GCL[etRos, , woLvES) , in galagala qus (or ga/agala quslar) 'flocks and flocks of birds'. Uzbek group classifiers are unlike group classifiers in some other languages in that they normally can take numerals much higher than bir 'one'. Uzbek unit classifiers are treated in Beckwith (1998).
3.8 Unit Classifier Languages and Group Classifier Languages Mandarin has many sortal unit classifiers, as well as many mensural classifiers. Assignment of count or mass to target nouns in Mandarin generally corresponds to that in English. However, in English count nouns take the [-cLASS] number specifying morphemes alan
92
3 •
A POD OF WHALES
•
[SfNGULAR] or -s/-es [PLURAL]. Moreover, in addition to its small number of [+cLASS] unit classifiers, English has a good number of obligatory [+cLASS] group classifiers, as discussed above. These correspond to a very small number of Mandarin group classifiers, none of which subcategorize animals taxonomically (or in any other ' way), unlike Mandarin unit classifiers, such as pi 'UCL[uoms. MUL�sl • t6u ' · ' 'UCL(ANIMALS; li.XnNDEO NON•RIIliD) ('h ead' 'UCL(CATTLE, OTIIE.R LARO" HERBIVORES)' 1lQO (used for snakes, fish, dogs [depending on dialect], and many other ' animals), and zhi 'UCL1,.NIMALS; ExTENoEo Riolo) (used for insects, cats, tigers, dogs [depending on dialect]. and many other animals). As shown above, nouns in Mandarin and other classifier lan guages are lexically assigned a default setting as count or mass, as in English, and agreement and other syntactic phenomena provide formal marking of the distinction. The essential difference between Mandarin and English in this regard is that in English, number specification is typically marked separately via discrete morphemes affixed to nouns, while in Mandarin specification is normally marked by the specifier classifier constituent of the pseudopartitive construction. Consider (41), where the Mandarin unit classifier zhi marks number specifica tion as well as agreement with the class to which mao 'cat' belongs. By contrast, the English noun is specified for number by the clitic a, without any class agreement. >
>
mao i i bdole yi zhi (41) xiaoha z hugged one UCL[ANIMAL; EXTENDED RJGmJ cat child 'The child hugged alone cat.' Mandarin has an extremely limited set of daily-use group classifiers, with only one, qun, for all animates, as in example (42); there are also a few inanimate group classifiers, as in (43).30
(42) you yi qun ren kii/e exist one GCL[ANlMATE) person came ' A crowd of people has arrived'.
30. Chao ( J 968: 595-598) gives a long list of what he calls 'group measures', but most of these are simply numerals, or nouns that can be used
as
phoronyms too.
However, most of the latter require use of the genitive-attributive suffix -de, unlike true group classifiers, which do not permit it. See Appendix A.
• THE GROUP
(43) nei pi
huo
CLASSIFIER
•
93
shi /amen-de
that GCL[INA><JMm) goods COP 3PL-GEN 'That batch of goods is theirs'.
This is in striking contrast to English, Russian, and other European languages, in which group classifiers tend to constitute a complex subcategory encoding culture-specific folk-taxonomic classification. However, although the distribution of the two types of classifier, unit and group, is different in English and Mandarin, both languages actually include the same categories to some degree. On the one hand English has pseudopartitive constructions and phoronyms-some of which are true classifiers-as well as a discrete number suffix for plu rals, while on the other, Mandarin has pseudopartitive constructions and phoronyms, some of which are true classifiers, and also a discrete number suffix for human plurals (-men).31 Therefore, a strict typologi cal distinction between the two languages cannot be established purely on the basis of number specification and classification.32
3 1 . It is notable that Japanese too has a suffix, -tachi, which can optionally be used to specify plural number for animates. 32.
In this chapter I have discussed a few European languages, but others, including French and Italian, apparently have group classifiers too. For example, the group classifiers in Italian include bronco (for dogs, wolves, gazelles, pigs, and ducks; also, metaphorically for thieves, etc.); gregge (for sheep and other ovids; also metaphorically for 'parishioners', as with flock in English-e.g., if gregge del vescovo); mandria (for large domestic or wild animals such as horses, elephants, etc.-e.g., una mandria di cavalli, una mandria de e/efantl); stormo (for flocks of flying bir:ds); sciame (for bees and other insects; metaphorically also for multitudes of people-e.g., uno sciame di ragazzi), and so on. Although their ex istence has been widely noted in many European languages, they have generally been miscategorized as 'collective nouns', as they have been in English.
• 4 • T H E
U N U S U A L
S U S P E C T S •
Classifier Languages and the Repeater This chapter is devoted to examination of lhe distribution, occurrence, and frequency of classifiers and classifier systems bolh within individual languages and cross-linguistically. It shows that 'true' classifiers are on the whole rarely used even in classifier languages.. The PHORONYM subtype generally known as lhe REPEATER is examined and it is shown how its existence brings into question the received view of what classifiers are, as well as the identification of particular languages as 'classifier languages'.
S
orne languages have several different obligatory noun classi fication systems within the same language (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 84-203), or the same set of morphemes may be used in dif ferent morphosyntactic loci in the same language (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Aikhenvald 2000: 204-241). By contrast, other languages may have unit classifiers but their usage is not widespread, or they are not obligatory for all nouns (Aikhenvald 2000: 99, 106, 1 1 7, 123-124). In giving examples from the Comaltepec Chinantec language, which she explains does not use classifiers for count nouns, but requires them for mass nouns, Aikhenvald (2000: 1 1 7) cites the classifier corresponding exactly to English sheet in a sheet of paper. According to the functional typology criteria that she uses to deter mine if a language has true classifiers or not, Comaltepec Chinantec has none. But is that all there is to it? If classifiers are not obligatory in all relevant situations, is it still justifiable to say that they are classifiers, and if a language has a limited classifier system, is it nevertheless a
• C L A S S I F I E R L A N G U A G E S A N D T H E REPEATER •
95
classifier language?1 In the early days of modern classifier studies, Allan ( 1977: 286) remarks, "Thai is a classifier language, but English is not." Lyons ( 1 977: 460) agrees, saying, "although very many of the world's languages make use of classifiers, the more familiar Indo European languages do not." Two decades later, Bisang ( 1999: 1201 2 1 ) says, "In languages such as English, there are quantifiers2 like lump or ball in a lump of sugar or a ball of thread, but there are no classifiers." Classifiers are thought to be remote from any known category in European languages, which-apart from Hungarian, and the existence of some 'incipient' classifiers in Russian-are believed to have no classifiers at all (Aikhenvald 2000: 120-124) The longstanding view in functional typology thus holds that whether or not there are examples of sortal unit classifiers in English, Finnish, Russian, and so on, none of these languages has a system of noun classification of the 'classifier type' such as is found in, e.g., Mandarin, Thai, Kilivila, and Tzeltal, involving obligatory covert se mantic agreement between sortal unit classifiers and nouns in which semantic categories such as 'extended', 'flat', 'round', 'animate', 'in animate', 'human', etc., are implied (Grinevald 2000; Denny and Creider 1986; Allan 1977). In other words, although English (among other languages which are not 'classifier languages' in the received view) has what appear to be sortal unit classifiers, as shown in Chapter Two, and although English group classifiers do indeed form a distinct system of noun classification in the language, as shown in Chapter Three, if the functional typologists' view is correct English, Russian, etc. are nevertheless not 'classifier languages'. But is the received view actually supported by the data? No one has hitherto contested the typological claims quoted above, among others, even though many are supported by erroneous examples (e.g., Aikhenvald 2000: 1 1 6; Grine vald 2000: 58-59, Craig 1994; Lehrer 1986). No one seems to have wondered why, if forms that do function as sortal classifiers are not true classifiers in English, they should be true classifiers in Mandarin or any other language. .
I.
On 'classifier languages' see also Appendix D.
2.
Bisang uses the term "quantifier" for what he calls lexical items "used for measuring" (Bisang 1999: 120); see the discussion of this problematic usage under the term PHORONYM in Appendix E.
96
4 • T H E U N U S U A L S U S P ECTS
•
4.1 Noun Classification and Agreement The pseudopartitivc construction, the wider grammatical category that includes the classifier phrase, is interesting in many ways, not least being the tight connection between its members and the presence of NUMBER, and in some languages distinctive CASE marking. Since this
covers two elements of the classic triad of number, case, and gender encoded in the portmanteau inflectional morphemes of European languages such as Classical Greek, Latin, German, and Russian, the question of the presence o r absence of the third element, noun classification, naturally arises. Lehman has explicitly denied that the classifiers of classifier lan guages 'classify' anything, but he does not actually deny that classifi ers are a kind of noun classification phenomenon, in one understand ing of the term, since he points out that the basic issues involved with them are number and agreement (Lehman 1979, 1990)_3 From this point of view, therefore, the question is determining what
kind
of
agreement is going on, other than the fact that it is generally covert or non-concord ia! rather than overt and concordia! (but see Chapter Seven). Practically speaking, this amounts to the question of how one determines whether what appear to be classifiers really are classifiers.
4.2 The Identification of True Classifiers Three criteria for determining whether a given language has 'true' classifiers are given in the literature. Firstly, many studies indicate that the classes implied by classifi ers do follow rather specific cross-linguistic rules of semantic organi zation akin to, but semantically somewhat different from, those found in gender systems. Accordingly-presumably because individual gen der markers are meaningless outside of a wider ranging gender system in a language-the question of whether or not a grammaticized or semi-grammaticized
system
of classifier-like
noun
classification
agreement is present in a language has been considered by functional
3.
He does not deal with the case marking of pseudopartitive constructions in European languages.
•
CLASSIFIER LANGUAGES A N D T H E REPEATER
typologists from Allan
•
97
(1 977) on to be the factor that determines
whether or not the individual forms in question are 'true' classifiers (Grinevald and Seifart
2004; Grinevald 2000; Craig 1994). In other
words, a language has true classifiers if it has true classifiers.4 Secondly, Greenberg
(1 972; cf. Serzisko 1986) points out that
languages with classifier systems do not have obligatory plural mark ing, though there are exceptions (Aikhenvald
2000: 100-101), and 1998; v. Chapter
also partial exceptions such as Uzbek (Beckwith
regard less of the inherent count, mass, or number of a noun-unlike, say, Three). The obligatory presence of classifiers with numerals
English, which generally does not require, or allow, classifiers with unit count nouns -has thus been considered to be a primary indicator of whether or not a language is a 'classifier language'. This criterion demands that a language
not distinguish between
classifiers for count
nouns (sortal classifiers) and classifiers for mass nouns ('mensural classifiers'). Thirdly, despite the previous criterion, the whole point of what may be called 'Classifier Theory' is that true classifiers categorize the nouns they refer to, they do not measure them. "The common charac teristic of nominal classification systems is that they classify the nouns of a given language" and "all nouns" are grouped by that classification into "a delimited number of classes" (Serzisko criterion requires that
only
1986). In short, this
sortal classifiers are 'true' classifiers, and
they must be distinguished from mensural classifiers, which are not 'true' classifiers. And indeed, classifier specialists have spent consid erable effort attempting to do just that.s
4.3 The Morphological Locus of Noun Classification Comparative typological studies of noun classification have shown very clearly that it not only has a certain semantic organization, it occurs within a wider morphosyntactic category. Grinevald, and following her, Aikhenvald, have argued that the different types of noun categorizing morphemes are based on the morphosyntactic loci
4.
The circularity of most treatments has apparently not been noticed.
5.
For a thorough summary, see Aikhenvald (2000: 1 14-120).
98
4
•
T H E U N U S U A L S U S PECTS •
within which these morphemes occur (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Aikhenvald 2000: I , 8; Grinevald 2000, Craig 1994, 1986a). Grine vald further argues that the morphosyntactic category has a significant effect on the semantic typ·e and organization of the categorization encoded (Grinevald and Seifart 2004). Since it is thus possible, theoretically, to find noun classification almost anywhere in the grammatical system of a language, in each case the type of noun classification may be somewhat different. For example, it is well known that gender systems-which are usually found as portmanteau features of inflectional categories, along with case and number-are closed systems that are normally limited to two or three categories, while it is believed that classifier systems, which are relatively open, can have hundreds of members that mark as many categories. In the last two decades it has also become well known that classifier systems, whether limited or extensive, often exist alongside other noun classification systems, as they do in Jacaltec (Craig 1986b, 1977; Day 1973), Tariana (Aikhenvald 2003a), and many other languages (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Grinevald 2000; Aikhenvald 2000: 184-241; Senft 2000a, I 996), yet no question has been raised concerning their status as 'true' classifier languages.
4.4 Classifier Distribution within Languages In actual speech (in contrast to the theoretical, or literary, lexicon) only a handful of classifiers are used by nearly all speakers of classifier languages. This has been shown in corpus studies of spoken Mandarin (Erbaugh 1 986) and Japanese (Downing 1996). In fact, one classifier, -ri UCL1HuMAN)> is the single most frequently occurring classifier in Japanese, used nearly twice as frequently as any other classifier (Downing 1996: 55, Table 3.1 ). Downing's data also show that the overwhelming majority of examples of anaphoric use of classifiers in Japanese must specifically be occurrences of the words hito-ri one-UCL1uuMAN) 'one person; alone' and futa-ri (futari) two UCL1uuMANJ 'two persons; two (people) together' (Beckwith l 999a). Mandarin is an even more extreme case. The 'default' classifier -ge 'UCL[ -cLAssJ' is "by far the most frequently used" (Erbaugh 1986: 403, 413) and has been said to occur hundreds of times more frequently than any other classifier.
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CLASSIFIER LANGUAGES A N D THE REPEATER
•
99
Languages with acknowledged classifier systems have long been known to include unclassifiable nouns (Aikhenvald 2000: 334-335; Greenberg 1978), while some 'prototypical' classifier languages do not have obligatory classifiers at all, for example Vietnamese, which has been said to be practically the prototypical classifier language (L<>bel 2000), and Khmer (Aikhenvald 2000:· 1 1 7; Adams 1989: 9). But according to a strict reading of the criteria given above, the exis tence of a classifier system cannot define a language as a 'classifier language' unless it covers all the nouns of the language. There are also languages which do not have obligatory plural number marking and do have a few classifiers, but nevertheless do not have classifier systems, such as Turkish (Lewis 1967) and most, per haps all, other Turkic languages except Uzbek (Beckwith 1998). And of course, some languages have more unit classifiers than other lan guages, some have more group classifiers than others, some have only one kind of classifier, while others have many types of classifier, and some have many of one type but few or none of another.
4.5 Classifiers That Do Not Classify Most functional typologists have agreed that mensural classifiers do not actually classify their nouns, and thus are not 'true' classifiers in the sense that sortal classifiers are (Grinevald 2000: 58-59), while a few others have argued against this view, noting that the two types have the same grammatical form and function and cannot really be distinguished (Senft 2000a).6 What this argument misses is the importance of the fundamental distinction that must be made between the two noted functions, the semantic class function, which is connected to AGREEMENT on the one hand, and grammatical NUMBER marking on the other (q.v. Chapter One). There are well known examples in every language of PHORONYMS that are neither sortal nor mensural classifiers, but occur in constructions that make de facto quantifiers (e.g., English lot in a lot of). In languages which require phoronyms with numerals or determiners, there are always what functional typologists call 'default classifiers' (such as Mandarin -ge)
6.
In Chapter Two it is shown that some mensural types are true classifiers.
100
4 •
THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
•
that do not classify, and classifiers that explicitly mean 'kind' or 'type' (hyperphoronyms such as Mandarin zhi5ng and lei, discussed in Chapter One) and refer to the categorizing function itself. Many classifier languages-e.g., Japanese, Burmese, Thai, Kili vila-also have 'repeaters' (sometimes mislabeled 'autoclassifiers'), redundant phoronym slot-fillers that are an exact duplicate of the counted noun (Aikhenvald 2000: 103-104, 335; Senft 2000: 39; Ad ams 1 989). Consider the examples of Japanese 'pure' repeaters in { l ) through (5) and 'partial' repeaters in (6) thiOugh {lOV The latter are called 'semi-repeaters' by Aikhenvald (2000: 103).
( 1)
kyoku
ik-kyoku
composition one-composition 'a piece of music'
(2)
bin
hito-bin
bottle one-bottle 'a bottEe'
(3)
shiai s i -shiai or shiai hito-shiai game one-game 'a match/game'
(4)
game one-game
heya hito-heya room one-room 'a room'
(5)
hako hito-hako box one-box 'a box'
7.
There are also examples of 'semantographic' repeaters, written with the same Chinese character and having the same denotation but pronounced according to the 'Japanese' reading (lam) for the noun and according to the 'Chinese' reading (on) for the classifier, or vice versa, e.g., �-� sakazuki ip-pai sake-cup (� sakazuki) one-MCL[cur) (� -pai) 'a sake cup', and A:=.A hito san-nin person (A hito) three-UCL[IIUMAN) (A -nin) 'three people'. cr. A-A hito hito-ri person one-UCL[nuMAN) 'one person', where the native Japanese noun hito 'person' is written with the same character as the native classifier for people, -ri. The latter is restricted to use with 'one' and 'two'; for larger numbers the Chinese loan classifier -nin (A) must be used with the borrowed Chinese numerals, as in A=..A hito san-nin 'three people'.
•
(6)
CLASS I F I E R LANGUAGES A N D T H E REPEATER
•
101
kenkyushitsu s-shitsu i research-room one-room 'an office (in a research institute or university)'
(7)
ik-ki
hikoki
airplane (lit., 'flying.machine') one-machine 'an airplane' (8)
ozara
hito-sara, kozara
hito-sara
big.dish one-dish small.dish one-dish 'a big dish, a small dish'
(9)
obeya
hito-heya, akibeya
hito-heya, benkyobeya hito-heya
big.room one-room vacant.room one-room study.room one-room 'a big room, a vacant room, a study' (10)
kibako
hito-hako, danbOrubako hilo-hako
wood.box one-box cardboard.box one-box 'a wooden box, a cardboard! box'
No one claims that such repeaters actually classify their nouns. But what are they doing, then? The existence of repeaters in Japanese, and evidently many other classifier languages, has been little discussed (but see Aikhenvald 2000: 361-362), and often overlooked.8 Yet is it really possible to construct a principled theory of classifiers without taking such forms more seriously into account?
4.6 Repeaters and Zero Anaphora In Thai, nouns that take repeaters are normally omitted. Thus, for example, the noun prateet 'country' is specified with a repeater, so that one can indeed say prateet saam prateet 'three countries' (Hundius and Kolver 1983: 190; cf. Aikhenvald 2000: 103), but in fact, the noun is normally omitted, as in ( 1 1 ), except when it is desired
8.
She rightly remarks that " 'Repeater' phenomena as agreement devices are in urgent need of a systematic study" (Aikhenvald 2000: 435). Mandarin does not seem to have any 'pure' repeaters, but there are some 'partial' repeaters, e.g., yi zhi shu-zhi one-UCL(EXTENoEo] tree-branch 'a branch', in which the classifier zhi and the class-term zhi are etymologically the same.
102
4 • THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS •
to emphasize it (which occurs more often in the written than the spoken language).9
( I I ) mii hok prateet thii doon khryyn tsunami exist six country REL PASS wave tsunami 'There are six countries which were affected by the tsunami.'
This is not quite an example of an unclassifiable noun, because the noun can appear in sentences like that in (12), where the classifier refers to it anaphorically (in this case, in the 'indefinite article' order) .
( 12) prateet thai pen prateet nyy thii doon khljyn tsunami country Thai be country one REL PASS wave tsunami 'Thailand is a country which was affected by the tsunami.' (Lit., 'The Thai country is a country which was affected by the tsunami wave.')
Nevertheless, it is clear that the noun prateet is unclassified in Thai, since it either takes a repeater or is not specified at all. The same is true of many loanwords, such as tsunami, which are either specified with a repeater or not at alL There are many such examples in Thai, and the situation is similar in other classifier languages that have repeaters (Aikhenvald 2000: 103-104, 3 1 8, 36 1-362). Classifiers are also omissible in Thai in many other instances, especially in informal Thai, according to Juntanamalaga ( 1988: 3 1 6, cited in Aikhenvald 2000: 349 n 41). Consider examples (44) through (46), in which (44) has normal counting order, (45) has normal indefinite singular order, and (46), with the same meaning as the example in (45), shows classifier drop, a frequent occurrence in spoken Thai. 10 ..
(44) mii Man nyy liiy
ytiu k/aay pew yai
have house one UCL[buildingJ exist midst forest big '(Long ago) there was one house in the great forest.
(45) mii Man liiy
nyy yiJu k/aay paa yai
have house UCL[b11iJdingJ one exist midst forest big '(Long ago) there was a house in the great forest.'
(46) mii Man nyy yim klaay paa yai have house one exist midst forest big '(Long ago) there was a house in the great forest.'
9. 10.
Krisadawan Hongladarom (p.c., 2005). Krisadawan Hongladarom (p.c., 2005).
'
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CLASSIFIER LANGUAGES A N D THiE REPEATER •
103
4. 7 Classifier Assignment and Variation Of classifiers that do classify the nouns to which they are assigned, most are invariable, as they must be in order for a 'classification system' to exist: the assignment of forms according to semantic category is the essence of a noun classification system. However, much has been made of what appears to be significant freedom in classifier assignment, as 'cognitive selection ' (Rijkhoff 2002: 76; Aikhenvald 2000: 3 1 9-320; Tai and Wang 1990; Becker 1986; Erbaugh 1986; Lehman 1979, 1990). One often-noted example of such variation is with Japanese taoru 'towel', which is normally counted with the classifier mai, used for flat things, but when rolled up it is counted with the classifier hon, used for extended, usually cylindrical things (Lakoff 1986, 1 987). However, one must assume that (unlike the observation of subatomic particles) an observer does not change the configuration of a towel by looking at it. With respect to this particular example it has been noted that different percepts (or definitions) of the same noun can indeed take different classifiers, but within those particular percepts variation is not permitted (assuming identity of speech competency, dialect, reg ister, and so on). Once the percept has been identified, classifier as signment is not up to the free choice of the speaker; the assignment for that percept is fixed. This 'variation' is also not predictable from noun to noun, and in fact, there do not seem to be any other examples of such 'variation' between mai and hon in Japanese-e.g., with paper, which must be classified with mai even if rolled up (Yui 1997). This suggests simple polysemy: the noun taoru means 'towel' and is classi fied with mai, as expected, while the homonym taoru means 'towel roll' (compare English bed-roll) and takes hon, as expected. Another example that has been cited is the evidently free variation between two Mandarin classifiers, men and tang, for ke 'class, course' (Erbaugh 1986: 412). Although the noun is unchanged, yi-men ke means 'a course' and yi-tang ke means 'a class' . 1 1
II.
Note also the class noun ketang, composed of ke 'class' plus tang (CLT[uAtl)) 'classroom', though there is evidently no parallel fonn *kemen for 'course'.
104
4 • THE U N U S U A L SUSPECTS •
The most famous example of this apparent variation is Hla Pe's ( 1967) list,'2 given in Table 8, of the many classifiers or other phoro nyms that can be used for the word myi ' 'river' in Burmese (Aikhen vald 2000: 319; Lehman 1979; Becker 1 986, 1 975) depending on its presentation or perception. As Aikhenvald (2000: 3 1 9) notes in refer ence to this list, "here numeral classifiers are most certainly not se mantically redundant."13 More significantly, perhaps, Becker analyzes the list as containing three 'true' classifiers-sin, pa:, and 8w£-and considers the rest non-classifying "measures (what Hla Pe calls quan tifiers)" (Becker 1986: 335), meaning non-classifier phoronyms. If a nominal referent bas not been mentioned in a discourse, and is not physically present either (so that its configuration or context cannot be visually ascertained), a speaker will indeed have to choose a particular classifier to clarify what exactly is being referred to, when it is known.
Table 8. Classifiers for 'river' in Burmese myi ' tal) hmwa sil): Owe
pa: khu
REP(IUYER) ("the unmarked case") UCL(uNE) (" e.g. on a map") UC4sECTloN) ("e.g. a fishing area") UCLrsrRAicurnuNcJ ("e.g. a path to the sea")
UCLrcoNNF.crloN) ("e.g. tying two villages") UCL[sACREoor�NasoRowEcrsJ ("e.g. in mythology") UCL[uN1rJ("e.g. in a discussion of rivers in general")
I 2. The list has been much cited because it is such an extreme exception to the rule. I did not have access to a copy of Hla Pe's original work at the time of writing, so I originally took the list from Aikhenvald (2000: 3 I 9), along with her examples of context, then dropped the last example, ya , a classifier for places ("e.g. '
destination for a picnic"), which is not in Becker's (1986: 335) quotation of Hla Pe's (1 967: 1 8 1 ) list. When this book was already composed and about to go to press I finally obtained a copy of the Lingua (1 965) version of Hla Pe's article electronically and have further corrected the transcription; it too does not include ' ya in the list. I regret that I could not take any of his interesting observations into account, notably the fact that, like many other linguists who are native speakers of a classifier language, he considers 'classifiers', 'measures', and 'repeaters' to be one category, though he refers to them as 'numeratives' (q.v. Appendix E). 13. Arguments about classifiers raised by the large number of them that can be used with the word myi ' 'river' (Corbett 1991: 136) seem to be partly responsible for Corbett's (1991: 5) statement that classifiers "do not show agreement."
•
CLASSIFIER LANGUAGES A N D THE REPEATER
But this is not, of course, meaningless
•
105
(pace Greenberg 1 974: 84), nor
is it really free variation-and in fact, most extended discussions of such variation (e.g., Adams 1986) do not treat it as such. Rather than multiple classifier assignment to the same morpheme, it is single classifier assignment to a specific thing, i.e., the real-world referent of the noun, a basic dictum of classifier assignment according to the functional typology view. Agreement is with real-world referents or percepts, not with nouns per se, as has been pointed out by virtually everyone who has discussed classifiers. To some extent this is not separable from the issue of polysemy, which is involved also in the difference between the semantics of the same morpheme when it is used as a noun and when it is used as a classifier--e.g.,
head
in
English and t6u 'head' in Mandarin.14 The same thing applies to English. For example,
a piece ofpaper
refers to a unit of paper, the size and shape left unspecified (it could be a part of a sheet of paper); a sheet ofpaper refers to the entire thing, a whole sheet of paper. English group classifiers behave this way too, as in the difference between the classifier flock in aflock ofsheep, which refers to a looser arrangement of sheep, versus the classifier herd in a herd ofsheep, referring to a more closely packed arrangement and to the animals' status as a kind of cattle. The classifiers piece and sheet, and flock and herd, are not synonymous, but they are also not freely selected for effect or due to sociolinguistic considerations. In short, while it is true that in most languages classifiers are not perhaps quite as fixed
in their assignment as
gender markers in 'gen
der languages •, they are in fact overwhelmingly fixed. By contrast, there is a sharp apparent difference in the freedom of choice between classifying a noun and not classifying it. In classifier languages, if a noun is already specified by context, or specification is simply unnec essary, a classifier will normally not occur. This accounts for the very low frequency of actual classifier occurrence in oral corpora (see be low). If a noun must be specified for number, then a phoronym (with a numeral or determiner) must be used, and if the phoronym is a classi fier it must agree with its noun referent, as noted (in some languages,
14.
Aikhenvald (2000: 271, 401 n. 39). For example, the drastically different meanings of table in dinner table, tax table, and water table can only be differentiated (out of context) by qualifiers-in this case, making three class nouns built on table as their formal class term.
Cf.
106
4
•
T H E UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
•
such as Thai and Vietnamese, certain nouns are either unclassified or obligatorily omitted in specification; see §4.6), but otherwise the free dom and variation available to speakers is basically just the choice of whether or not to explicitly specify a noun.
4.8 Sortal Classifier and Classified Noun Frequency Corpus studies have shown that classifiers, of whatever kind, actually occur rather rarely-something on the order of a few percent of all tokens in most texts (Downing 1996; Erbaugh 1 986). This is not surprising, since classifiers can only occur with a noun in a pseudopartitive construction, or in the abbreviated form of it used in anaphora (i.e., minus the noun). Because the category of 'classifier' in these studies includes sortal, mensural, and 'default' phoronyms, it must further be noted that the vast majority of these classifier occurrences are of minimally classifYing or non-classifYing phoro nyms such as -ge in Mandarin and -tsu and -ri in Japanese, as noted above, leaving a tiny percentage of occurrences for 'true' sortal unit classifiers (Downing 1996; Erbaugh 1986). The idea that languages can be categorized as 'classifier languages' and 'non-classifier languages' based on the presence or absence of classifier systems thus seems to be questionable at the very least. Moreover, in languages of whatever type, once phoronyms with purely grammatical (or anyway, non-categorizing) function are elimi nated from consideration, the phoronyms that are left are indeed 'true' classifiers, but in most, if not all, languages there are remarkably few of them. In Mandarin, the 'canonical' classifier language, there are less than a dozen 'true' classifiers in everyday use (Erbaugh 1986: 410-41 1),15 as there are in Japanese, and as noted above each system uses only one or two classifiers for the vast majority of pseudoparti tive constructions. Analysis of other classifier systems reveals the same pattern. Although Tzeltal is said to have 148 classifiers, only 9
15.
Erbaugh does not d istin guish between sortal and mensural classifiers in her data. Of the classifiers used by adults in adult-child conversation, ten out of the total (thirteen) are sortal unit classifiers, while in her adult-adult conversational classifier use table, only seven different classifiers of any kind were used, one of which seems to be a quasiphoronym (Erbaugh I 986: 410-4 I I).
• C L A S S I F I E R LANGUAGES A N D T H E REPEATER •
107
are 'true' (or 'inherent') classifiers (Berlin 1968: 177); in Vietnamese, out of 144 classifiers, there are only 1 0 'true' (or 'inherent state') clas sifiers (Lobel 2000: 300); "Mokilese has only four numeral classifi ers" (Rijk.hoff 2002: 77), as does the Tai language Nung (Aikhenvald 2000: 1 03; Saul and Wilson 1980: 25); 16 and so on. If frequency stud ies were done ·of large oral corpora in these languages, it may be pre dicted (on the basis of the above-cited actual small corpus studies done of Mandarin and Japanese) that only a few among these 'true' classifi ers will tum out to dominate the entire system almost to the exclusion ofthe others in the 'true' classifier set. If all unclassified nouns-i.e., nouns that occur without a phoro nym of any kind (for whatever reason), plus nouns that occur with a 'general' non-classifying phoronym-are assigned to an 'unclassified' category, regardless of whether or not the language has obligatory number marking, the overwhelming majority of noun occurrences are covered. A tiny minority then fall into the 'classified' category, and of those an even tinier number are actually categorized by true classifiers. This phenomenon occurs also in gender languages. Most nouns are not actually classified semantically by their gender marking. For example, French Ia table 'the table' and Ia poule 'the chicken' have feminine gender, while le livre 'the book' and le poussin 'the chicken; chick' have masculine gender; le poulet 'the hen', despite its female semantics, is masculine. All this is purely form-class gender, not se mantic gender, which does however occur regularly (in principle) with nouns referring to female and male humans, e.g., unefemme 'a woman (feminine)' and un homme 'a man (masculine)'. Few nouns in French are thus truly classified. This is shown in Figures I 0 and 1 1 . all nouns > specified nouns > classified nouns > semantically classified nouns Figure 10. Classification distribution In classifier systems
all nouns > inflected nouns > classified nouns > semantically classified nouns Figure 11. Classification distribution In gender systems
16. However, Nung 'classifiers' might be noun class markers; more study is needed.
108
4 • T H E UNUSUAL S U S PECTS •
4.9 Markedness and Susceptibility to Classification As noted above, noun classification occurs in different morphosyn tactic loci. For this reason, in some languages it occurs in more than one fonn. Why, though, does it occur in a particular morphosyntactic locus in one language but not in another, or in all languages? Table 9. S ingular
third person pronouns in
English
FEMININE
he she
NEUTER
il
MASCULINE
English
and
Tibetan
Tibetan
!!'o - !!'oriiii mo - moriiii
As shown in Table 9, English and colloquial Tibetan mark natural gender with their third person pronouns. However, it is a curious fact that in the Tibetan honorific register, the personal pronouns are not marked for gender-the third person singular and plural honorific pronouns are ll'oo '3sa1HoN1' and ll'ootso '3PL[HoN1' . B y contrast, while Mandarin does not mark personal pronouns for gender, a small number of nouns referring to humans can take the plu ral suffix -men, which is otherwise restricted to the personal pronouns. With these nouns (e.g., /aoshimen 'teachers' , xueshengmen 'students') the suffix can therefore be considered a gender or animacy classifica tion marker. (See Appendix B.) The analysis of frequency and distribution presented above leads to the conclusion that phoronyms which do categorize their nouns are grammatically marked, in contrast to the majority of phoronyms, which are unmarked. In English, it is notable that the nouns which take obligatory sortal unit classifiers (e.g., furniture) are marked pre cisely by the fact that they although they refer to countable objects, grammatically they cannot take plural or singular specification, unlike the vast majority of semantically count nouns, which can. The same may be said of group classifiers, which are marked by the unusual fact that they refer to plurals as units (i.e., unlike the majority of nonnal plurals in English), but take plural agreement, so they are not actually [-cOUNT]. In Mandarin, only a few nouns can take the plural marker -men, as noted above, so when they occur they too are highly marked. In fact, when unclassified nouns-the vast majority-are taken out of consideration, what is left in many languages is an unusual,
• CLASS I F I E R LANGUAGES A N D THE REPEATER
•
109
highly marked subset of the class of nouns. That is where the noun classification tends to show up. It is thus not surprising that speakers attempt not only to systematize this irregularity but to justify it seman tically. Plural marking per se in English is a normal characteristic of count nouns, so when it does occur the noun is not classified. In Man darin, it is not normal, so when it occurs the noun is classified. In both English and Mandarin most nouns are normally counted without any real classification taking place. In English, true classifiers occur precisely with grammatically highly marked nouns. In Mandarin and other 'classifier languages' only a few nouns are actually classi fied-are they, too, marked in some hitherto overlooked way? Consid ering the fact that such nouns can only be a tiny number of all the nouns in a language, gender systems follow the pattern of noun classi fication seen in English and Mandarin: the 'true' noun classification occurs in marked examples of a particular type of morphosyntactic locus. The dominant theme of several recent studies of gender marking in German is that whereas coHective nouns, abstract nouns, and de rived mass nouns are mostly feminine and marked, the fully 'individu ated' (Vogel 2000), underived nominatives are masculine and un marked, and the most typical and frequently occurring neuter nouns refer to materials-e.g., das Blur 'the blood' (Weber 2000: 503). This leaves out nouns referring to humans, where, significantly, semantic gender plays the dominant role. Further work in this direction may clarify the reason for this distribution of noun categorization.
4.10 The Idea of a Classifier Language The received characterization of classifiers and classifier systems in functional typology is plagued by a labyrinth of circularities, over sights, and contradictions, among other difficulties. A characterization which takes into account the above clarifications of actual classifier occurrence and distribution may be proposed. There are languages such as Mandarin in which count nouns can only be specified for number with the pseudopartitive construction, some of the phoronyms of which are •true' classifiers-i.e., they evidently really do 'cate gorize' their nouns-while there are languages such as English in which count nouns are usually specified for number through other means. At the same time, in some languages, such as English, groups
1 10
4 •
T H E U N U S U A L S U S P ECTS •
or collections of noun referents can only be specified with the pseudo partitive construction, some of the phoronyms of which are true classifiers, while in languages such as Mandarin, groups or collectives are specified with the pseudopartitive construction, but few of the phoronyms are true classifiers. In both types of language, a small number of nouns are rarely classified, by a small number of classifiers. No language actually classifies all of its nouns, whether it has tra ditionally been classed as a European 'gender language' (with 'inde clinables') or a non-European 'classifier language' (with 'unclassifi able nouns', default classifiers, repeaters, measures, etc.), and by the same token-as shown by Finnish-no language classifies none of its nouns. Disregarding the non-classifying morphosyntactic category (or 'grammatical locus') in which a given noun classification system oc curs, and eliminating non-classifying examples of it from the corpus of class markers (i.e., throwing out all examples of non-classifying phoronyms in classifier languages, and non-classifying gender mark ing in gender languages), what is left is always a limited noun classifi cation system, regardless of the 'type' of language in question.17 The evidence thus shows that all languages-including those tra ditionally called classifier languages-actually have 'limited' or 'par tial' noun categorizing systems. Classifiers do exist, and languages generally do require that a pseudopartitive construction more or less always be used in specifying certain categories of nouns, notably when 'measures' are involved. Perhaps languages may best be ranked along a continuum ranging from those like Japanese, Mandarin, and Thai, which require use of a pseudopartitive construction and unit classifiers when specifying most unit count nouns, to languages like English, Finnish, and Russian, which require use of the pseudoparti tive and group classifiers with most collections of animate count nouns. But in any event, there is actually no such thing as a 'classifier language' in the sense intended in the functional typology literature.
17.
Noun classification is not unimportant because it is so limited. To the contrary, any linguistic phenomenon found in all languages is extremely important. The task now is to understand not only why noun categorization is so similar cross linguistically, but why it is so limited and at the same time so pervasive.
• 5 • A D D I N G
A P P L E S
A N D
O R A N G E S •
Functional Categories and Taxonomy What appear to be clear examples of classifier agreement are often baff lingly ungrammatical. This chapter shows that the usual classifier categories of linguistic parlance are not themselves grammaticized; agreement is ac tually based on low level taxonomies within them. The CLASSIFIER PHORO NYM is thus a form class marker that typically includes many categories, much like gender markers in European inflectional languages.
0
ne conclusion that has been drawn in the modem analysis of classifier categories is that they are mostly different from classical taxonomies (Aikhenvald 2000: 3 1 6-317). On the basis of some remarkable examples, many linguists have argued that classifier categories are fundamentally akin to prototype categories, though the importance of metaphorical extension is also recognized (Aikhenvald 2000: 308; Craig 1994; Lakoff 1 986, 1987). Those who have taken this path have dealt at great length with the typological semantics of configurational classifiers, analyzing them into subcate gories according to extension in one, two, or three dimensions, and so on (Aikhenvald 2000: 289-290; Craig 1994; Denny and Creider 1986: 227-228; Denny 1979). They have had little success analyzing inani mate classifiers of the 'kind' or heterogeneous type, because in proto type theory, a category is organized around its central point, not its boundaries (Denny 1979: 324; Rosch 1973), and by definition a hete rogeneous set does not have a central point. In fact, it has long been known that the majority of classifiers in Japanese are neither configu rational nor taxonomic. There are believed to be around four dozen Japanese classifiers of all kinds in regular use today, out of a theore tical total of around 150 (Downing 1996: 294-3 10), but Denny ( 1979:
112
5 • A D D I N G APPLES A N D ORANGES
•
3 1 9) counts only seven configurational classifiers, and there are about the same number of animate classifiers. Neither the taxonomy ap proach nor the prototype approach is thus likely to produce a good model of classifier categories in Japanese. Thus, while some sortal classifiers do reveal interesting cognitive (evidently sublinguistic) patterns of categorization, some of which are clearly configurational, and others clearly taxonomic, the majority of classifiers do not imply coherent categories of any kind (Downing 1996; Beckwith J 995, 1997; DeLancey 1 986). The explanation for this anomaly has been elusive, but Downing (1996) has identified the crux of the problem.
5.1 Anaphoric summation She points out that a set of nouns that take the same classifier can sometimes be referred to anaphorically in summation, as in (I), 1 but in other cases, as in (2), this is not possible (Downing 1996: 1 15). (I)
Neko ip-piki, inu ni-hiki, buta go-hiki, zenbu de cat 1-hiki dog 2-hiki pig 5-hiki all LOC hap-piki o kalte imasu. 8-hiki ACC raising be. 'I'm raising one cat, two dogs, five pigs, eight animals2 in all.'
(2)
*Kuruma ni-dai, sofa san-dai, terebi ichi-dai, car 2-dai sofa 3-dai TV 1-dai zenbu de roku-dai o tsuida. all LOC 6-dai ACC inherited *'1 inherited two cars, three sofas, and one TV, six dai in all.'
Downing suggests that the ••oddity" of the phrase zenbu de roku-dai in the second sentence, which she translates as "six dai in all," is due to
I.
I have modified Downing's parsing slightly to confonn somewhat more closely to the fonnat of this book, but have left in place her analysis and her style of marking numerals and classifiers, which
I have used throughout the chapter to
facilitate comparison among the examples. I have also transcribed all long vowels with a circumnex rather than by doubling as in her examples, to accord with my practice in the rest of this book.
2.
The word 'animals' is not present in the Japanese. It is supplied by Downing from the sortal unit classifier for animals,
hiki (q.v. below).
• F U N C T I O N A L C A T E G O R I E S A N D TAXONOMY
•
1 13
the relative heterogeneity of the objects it enumerates. She says, "the co-membership of the various subcategories included in the dai category is overridden by their distinctiveness at what is apparently a more basic level of classification" (Downing 1997: 1 1 5). She con cludes, perceptively, that classifier categories "may not be seman tically homogeneous, but may instead contain members of different statuses, included on the basis of different semantic rationales" (Downing 1997: 1 19). She refers in part to the fact that few specialists now would argue that configurational classifiers set up classical tax onomies/ and in part to the fact that semantically there is a continuum within sortal unit classifier types, ranging from the purely taxonomic types to the more or less purely prototypical or configurational types. Taxonomy-oriented approaches to classifier analysis have been criticized by specialists in classifier languages (Downing 1996: 125; Lehman 1979, 1990: 89-93), who consider prototype theory more ap propriate (Aikhenvald 2000: 3 1 7; Lakoff 1986, 1 987). Yet attempts to define the implied categories of non-configurational classifiers such as dai according to either approach have not been successful because it is difficult, if not impossible, to agree on either taxonomic heads or cen tral prototypes for their categories. One is inclined to wonder, for ex ample, what the class-head or prototype of the classifier dai in (2) could be, with its extremely heterogeneous referents. Downing gives "vehicles" as the "apparent prototype" of dai (Downing 1996: 295). However, although it may be the most fre quently occurring referent in everyday Japanese it is clearly unaccept able as a prototype if one considers the wide range of heterogeneous referents with which dai is commonly used, including the items listed in example (2) and many others. One could persist in attempting to make sense of the putative category marked by dai, perhaps organiz ing it around the prototype BOXY MANUFACTURED OBJECTS, but in view of its vagueness it would still not make much sense as a proto type.4 It must be accepted that such classifiers simply do not in them-
3.
Some studies of classifiers (e.g., (Denny
1979),
ncluding i Japanese classifiers,
have described the entire system of a given language as a complex taxonomy.
4.
Downing includes sponge cake as one of the things classified by dai ( 1996:
295).
Though my informants did not know this usage, Megumi Yui (p.c.) informs me that it is correct She writes, "... the cake should be a whole one, not just a piece," noting that it is a "technical usage, for those who like baking cake, or
1 14
5
•
A D D I N G APPLES A N D O R A N G E S •
selves establish either explicitly inclusive taxonomic categories or clear prototype-based categories. As noted above, most sortal classifi ers actually belong to the heterogeneous type (Craig 1994), of which the best that can be said appears to be that they imply categories con sisting of the heterogeneous collections of things that they agree with or refer to (cf. Lakoff 1 986). Clearly, this is a major problem for the theory that classifiers actually categorize nouns or their referents. Downing's ill-fonned sentence with dai UCLJooxv, MANUFAcruRw) in example (2) would thus seem to support the more pessimistic of recent views, which rejects the idea that classifiers categorize the nouns they co-occur with or refer to anaphorically. However, example ( 1 ) is sig nificant. The enumerated items-the cat, the dogs, and the pigs-are basic-level items taxonomically. That is, all of them occur in folk taxonomy one level down from the same implicit superordinate level head ANIMAL,5 the central prototype of which is usually a medium sized mammal. In example (2), a more idiomatic translation into Eng lish might conclude, "six in all," but the summation still would not make sense. The numeral plus classifier dai UCL1aoxv. MANUFAcruuoJ in this position would correspond to the plural number specifier -s and an indefinite pronoun in English, so that a literal translation would be 'six of them'. Nevertheless, in the absence of an inclusive noun, one is still compelled to ask, "Six of what?" An English sentence with the same problem as that in (2) is given in example (3).
(3)
*John bought a piece of land, two pieces offurniture, and a piece of classified information-four pieces in all.
One may try to 'improve' example (2) by substituting beddo 'bed' for sofa 'sofa·· and moratta 'got' or 'received' for the relatively uncom mon verb tsuida 'inherited', by dropping the fonnal-sounding accu sative marker, and by substituting the generic inanimate classifier tsu for dai, producing example (4). However, example (4) is still odd. In Japanese, cars, sofas, and TVs are all inanimate mono 'things' and are
(those who) bake cake professionally," and is known also to those who order sponge cakes. It appears on order forms as "whipped cake _ dai, chocolate cake _ dai, etc." (A numeral is written in the space before dai.) This is similar to English-speaking bakers' usage of"a sheet of cake, a half-sheet of cake," etc., for flat, rectangular cakes.
5.
See Figure I in Chapter Seven for a typical folk taxonomy.
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FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES A N D TAXONOMY •
thus optionally (and often) classified with
tsu
115
UCL[INANIMATE! instead of
dai UCL[ooxv MANUFACTIJRED)· ,
*Kuruma ni-dai, beddo san-dai, terebi ichi-dai, car 2-dai bed 3-dai TV 1-dai zenbu de mut-tsu moral/a. all LOC 6-tsu got (*)'I got two cars, three sofas, and one TV, six (of them) in all.'
(4)
Yet even if the sentence is rewritten
terebi hito-tsu UCL[u<-ANIMATEJ), collectively as
kuruma futa-tsu, beddo mit-tsu,
(car one-UCL[INANIMATE! bed three-UCL[INANIMATE!> TV one etc., it is stiU not possible to refer to them all
zenbu de muttsu
'six in all'. Although the items listed
in this sentence are all basic-level inanimates, they do belong neither to the same higher-level taxonomic class nor to the same natural prototype class. In other words, they are not six different instances or types of 'the same kind ofTHING', unlike the cat, dogs, and pigs in
(I),
which are different kinds of ANIMAL, normally classified in Japanese with
hiki
UCL[ANIMAL[·6 To the mind of a native English speaker and
most native Japanese speakers, a car is 'a VEHICLE', a sofa is ' a piece of FURNITURE', and a television set is 'a piece of ELECTRONIC ENTER
TAINMENT EQUIPMENT' or something of that sore It is generally agreed that classifiers categorize real-world referents-in other words, things corresponding to basic level and subordinate level nouns-not the nouns per se themselves. A given classifier stands at the head of a superordinate level immediately above the basic level members, but does not correspond or refer to the ultimate superordinate taxonomic head, which for inanimates is mono 'THING '.8 In examples (2) and (4), the classifier dai is expected to do both and it does not work. The problem seen in the contrast between examples
(I) and (2)
appears to involve class-inclusion, and apparently taxonomy. As can be seen from examples (2) and (4), the different basic level noun cate gories referenced by the same classifier cannot be directly connected
6.
7. 8.
wa
RADoiTsJ• to UCL[LARCE ANIMALS)• rilnin UCL[uUMI\NS)• kala UCL[uuMANS (noNoRJFIC)J and mei UCL[nuMANs (nosoRIFic))· Shellfish, sea
Other animate classifiers are
UCL[aiRos.
urchins, and the like are classified as inanimates. See below. Note the English classifiers, which often occur with superordinate level nouns. One informant objected to example (3) on the grounds that it· feels wrong to switch classifiers in a summation .. This observation is true for Mandarin as well.
1 16
5 • A D D I N G APPLES A N D O R A N G E S •
to each other by an overarching head-either the same classifier or one that does refer to an inclusive superordinate level. Thus it is clear that classifiers cannot directly head or refer to explicitly or implicitly multiple categories. But if an appropriate inclusive noun for the clas sifier to agree with is provided, as in example (5), where the summa tion (zenbu de mono muttsu moral/a 'I got six things in all) includes a full classifier expression, the sentence is acceptable to most speakers. (5)
Kuntma ni-dai, beddo san-dai, terebi ichi-dai, car 2-dai bed 3-dai TV 1-dai zenbu de
mono mul-lsu moral/a. thing 6-ISII got got six things in all: lwo cars, three beds, and one TV.'
all
'1
LOC
However, in this sentence the classifier tsu UCL[INANIMAT�I refers directly to the superordinate noun mono 'thing'; it no longer refers to the enumerated items. Although example (5) is acceptable to many speakers, it tells us nothing about the class membership o f the basic level items listed in the sentence. Moreover, as has already been seen in example (4), if the noun is dropped and tsu is used anaphorically, the sentence is completely unacceptable. This again shows that nouns can establish taxonomies that classifiers can agree with or refer to, but classifiers themselves cannot head their own classes. Consider another example. As a result o f Lakofrs ( 1 986, 1987) prototype analysis (cf. Aikhenvald 2000: 309-3 10), the Japanese clas sifier hon UCL[EXrENoEo) is one of the best known and most widely cited classifiers in the literature. It has one ofthe largest and most heteroge neous sets o f referents in Japanese, but because it is also one of the most productive configurational classifiers, the metaphorical exten sions that account for some of the more peculiar members o f the cate gory diachronically are still recoverable, as shown by Lakoff. Never theless, the same principle as in example (2) above still operates. Al though two pens, two rolled-up towels, and two movies are each counted ni-hon two hon UCL[ExTENDEo), we cannot list them and give as a summation zenbu de roppon 'all together six (?)s', as in example (6). -
(6)
*Empilsu ni-hon, taoru ni-hon, eiga ni-hon 2-hon towel 2-hon movie 2-hon
penci l
zenbu de
all
LOC
rop-pon terebi de mila. 6-hon television LOC saw.
*'I saw two pencils, two towels, and two movies, six (?)s in all, on TV.'
•
FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES A N D TAXONOMY
•
1 17
As with example (2), anyone hearing this sentence is baffled by the weird assortment of things that the speaker is trying to count together, regardless of the presence of the same classifier in the Japanese summation. The normal reaction in Japanese, English, or any other language would be to ask, "Six
what?"
However, if we bought, say,
three pens, two pencils, and a Japanese writing brush, we can sum them all up as zenbu de roppon, 'six in all' as shown in (7).
Empitsu sam-bon, pen ni-hon, fode ip-pon, 3-hon pen 2-hon brush I-hon
(7)
pencil
zenbu de
rop-pon katta.
all LOC 6-hon bought 'I bought three pencils, two pens, and one writing brush, six (WRJTING TOOL)s in all.' The Japanese sentence in example (7) is acceptable because the classifier hon, like nearly all classifiers, classifies things at a low superordinate level immediately above the basic level nouns being counted-in other words, the things must be 'the same kind of thing' according to everyday folk taxonomy-and in this case the Japanese perception is that these are in fact the 'same kind of thing', namely
ROD-SHAPED WRITING TOOLS. This implied category head, common to all three kinds of things, is the immediately superordinate term in the natural taxonomy to which the things belong. That is precisely the level at which the classifier
hon agrees
with them, so
hon can be used
anaphorically in the summation to refer to them all. Now if the sentence in (4) is rewritten so that the things counted with
dai remain
within the same immediate superordinate taxonomic
category, an acceptable sentence is produced. Thus the sentence in example VEHICLE,
(8)
(8), in which all of the items listed belong to the category is acceptable in Japanese.
Kuruma ni-dai, basu san-dai, torakku ichi-dai, car 2-dai bus 3-dai truck 1-dai zenbu de
roku-dai mila.
all saw LOC 6-dai 'I saw two cars, three buses, and one truck, 6 (VEHICLE)s in all.' There is a difference in explicitness, and therefore acceptab ility, be tween the Japanese examples and the English equivalents in examples
(7) and (8). To an English speaker, these sentences are still wrong without the parenthetical additions, which tell in each case what cate-
118
5
• ADDING APPLES A N D ORANGES
•
gory of things is being counted. Since the Japanese configurational classifier
hon UCLIEXTE�
refers to things that are saliently extended,
and configurational classifiers often function much as adjectives do in English, a literal translation of the Japanese summation in example (7) might be 'six longish ones in all'. Yet one still feels compel led to ask, "Six long
whats?"
In American primary schools children are taught
that they cannot "count apples and oranges." The reason is that in English only things that are 'identical' can be counted together. This is why a noun or pronoun is needed with every summation in the examples given here. In Japanese, though, the agreement of the same classifier with each item allows speakers to count similar things together as long as they are basic-level or subordinate-level things headed by the same 'slightly superordinate' natural taxonomic head, as are apples and oranges, which are both ROUND, MEDIUM-SIZED FRUIT.
Similarly, because pencils, pens, and writing-brushes are all
ROD-SHAPED WRITING INSTRUMENTS,
they can be counted together
with the classifier
The fact that this particular
hon UCL(mENoEol·
classifier is also used to count rolled-up towels, movies, and many other things, is irrelevant-they belong to separate classes, with which
the classifier hon also agrees, or to which it refers.
5.2 The Taxonomic Constraint The above discussion shows that in Japanese there is a TAXONOMIC CONSTRAINT ON CLASSIFIER ANAPHORA.
Although classifiers may
agree with nouns at any level, in anaphora classifiers can only agree according to strictly taxonomic classes in which the members agree at the basic level (or levels subordinate to it).9 Classifiers simply do not head complex classes, however logical such classes may seem to linguists. This holds true even for the instances of what appear to be agreement at a higher taxonomic level, such as with the classifiers
9.
The taxonomic constraint may provide yet another test as to whether a given phoronym is a sortal or mensural classifier, since it does not affect some mensural expressions. For example, it seems perfectly acceptable to say, I added two cups ofmilk, a cup offlour. and a cup ofground beef. altogetherfour cups. to the other ingredients in the bowl. Whether this is true for mensural classifiers other than containers is less clear. Further research is needed.
• FUNCTIONAL CATiEGORIES A N D TAXONOMY •
ri/nin
119
10 ,
and hiki UCL[ANIMALI> which head the HUMAN and ANIMAL categories respectively, even though in folk taxonomy these superordinate heads are actually only one level above their basic level noun members: the classifiers themselves do not head the categories, they agree with the implied superordinate heads of the categories. The general inanimate classifier tsu does agree with mono 'thing', and therefore refers to a much higher superordinate level with many complex taxonomies under it, but in anaphora it falls nevertheless under the same agreement constraint as all other classifiers, as is shown by example (4). Grammatically speaking, therefore, each putative 'classifier class' constructed by linguists is in fact either a collection of separate taxonomies of nouns that independently agree with the same classifier, or a single taxonomy of basic level nouns, such as with classifiers for humans, or inanimate classifiers that have very restricted agreement sets, or as with some of the animate group classifiers of English. While neither classical taxonomy nor prototype theory works well for most heterogeneous classifiers, such as dai UCL[ooxv. MANUFAc-ruREoJ, or for most configurational classifiers, 12 such as hon UCL[unNo�:oJ, such classifiers function exactly the same as other classifiers with respect to the taxonomic constraint on class inclusion in anaphoric reference. Any collection of things-as long as they are considered to be 'the UCL[HuMAN] 11
I0. The suppletive form nin is used for numbers higher than two, but ri specifically is used nearly twice as frequently as any other Japanese classifier (Downing 1996: 55, Table 3. I). In fact. the great majority of examples of anaphoric use of classifiers in Downing's (I996: I 69, I 7 I ) data must specifically be occurrences of the word jutari (futa-ri 2-UCL[uuMANJ) 'two (persons)'. By Downing's (1996: 18) own analysis of a sample of classifier usages of all kinds from both oral and written sources, 82% involved only five different classifiers. II. In Japanese folk taxonomy (based on informants' statements), 'animals' are defined as those animates which take the classifier hiki 'UCL[ANIMAL)'· Birds, which are obligatorily classified with wa 'ucL1u1Ros]' are thus not 'animals'-this underlies one of the more believable reasons for the alternate (now literary, or formal) irregular classification of rabbits with wa-and shellfish are classed as inanimates. However, although cattle and whales are recognized as 'animals', the classifier iil to 'UCL[LARGE ANIMALs]' (a known loan from Middle Chinese; cf. Mandarin iil lou 'head; UCL[LARGHMMMALS)') is normally used for them.
12. Downing (1996: 75) distinguishes inanimate "quality-based" (configurational) classifiers from "kind-based" (non-configurational) classifiers.
120
5 •
ADDING APPLES AND
O R A N G ES •
same kind of thing'�an be referred to together with the same classi fier, as in example ( I ) with hiki UC L[ANIM,Ls), example (7) with hon UC Llum•-owl• and example (8) with dai UCL1ooxv. MM
seiyo-ninjin sam-bon. kintoki-ninjin ni-hon. European-carrot 3-UCLlExTENoEo] Japanese-carrot 2-UCL[ExTENI>Eo] bebi-kyarotto nana-hon, zenbu de jfini-hon katta. LOC 1 2-UCLlEXrENoF.oJ bought baby-carrot 7-UCL[F.XTENoEo] all 'I bought three European carrots, two Japanese carrots, and seven baby carrots, twelve in all.'
As is generally recognized, taxonomic analysis is applicable to the agreement categories of the animate classifiers rilnin UCL111uMANsJ, hiki UCL[ANIMALsJ, to UCL[LARGE ANIMAlS)• and wa UCL1o1Ros. RABBITS]• as well as the synonym classifiers satsu UCLloooKs] and ma UCLlRooMsJ· All of these may be considered true 'taxonomic classifiers' properly speaking13 because they agree with (and essentially correspond to) the immediate superordinate heads of their categories. Therefore, a 1 : 1 correspon dence exists between the grammatical agreement category and the semantic agreement category for each o f these classifiers. However,
13. The list of ··superordinate-subordinate pairs" of Japanese classifiers given by Aikhenvald (2000: 317), while interesting, is acrually of taxonomic sets of classifiers, not of individual classifiers and their referents. This approach to taxonomic analysis of classifiers-superordinate classifier heads of subordinate classifiers (Denny 1979)-has been criticized by many classifier specialists (e.g., Aikhcnvald 2000: 316; Downing
1996: 125; cf.
Lehman
1979, 1990).
•
FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES A N D TAXONOMY
•
121
because anaphoric usage-which occurs at least as frequently as full pseudopartitive constructions-is always restricted purely to taxonom ic sets, all fully grammatical classifier categories must be taxonomic. But then, how are the different, often semantically highly diverse sets headed by the same classifier related, if they are related? This is especially problematic for configurational classifiers, which refer to semantic fields often represented by adjectives in other languages. The 'banana' examples of Lyons (1968: 288) quoted in Chapter One are paralleled closely by some actual classifiers, as shown in the Garo examples in ( 1 0), 14 and the Hungarian classifiers in ( 1 I). Both szem and to also occur as independent nouns, with the respective meanings 'eyeball' and 'root' (Beckwith 1992b: 205). (10)
/erik
rol)-gini
banana UCLtrxu1r]-two 'two bananas' ( I I ) egy szem
terik
bor-gini
banana UCLtruertwo 'two banana trees' szo/o
one UCLts�o�..t uoW
egy to
szolo
one UCLtrREES. ousuesJ grape 'one grapevine'
It is notable that the English glosses in both (I 0) and (I I) have simple nouns for the basic-level things banana and grape, but class nouns for the subordinate-level items banana tree and grapevine. This suggests that the examples given by Lyons are misleading in more ways than one. In addition to the headedness question mentioned in Chapter One, the Hungarian examples in ( I I ) do not say 'one fruit grape' and 'one tree grape'. Generally speaking, classifiers are metaphorically extend ed; they usually have other primary denotations if they can occur as free nouns.15 Also, as noted in Chapter One, more comparable English examples do exist, such as the class nouns kiwi fruit and kiwi tree in one kiwi fruit : one kiwi tree. Consider also the examples in (12) and
These examples from Garo, a Tibeto-Burman language, are taken from Burling ( \96 I : 5 I). They correspond exactly to 1he two fruit banana' and 'two tree banana' examples given by Lyons (though the latter are not really correct lranslations of the Garo forms). Note that the Garo classifier roiJ for "most varieties of fruit" is also for small roundish things in general, including small slones, pieces of earth, toy balls, coins, eyes, etc. (Burling 196\: 52). I 5. Much auention has been given to metaphorical exlens ion. See especially Aikhenvald (2000: 309-3 16), Lakotr( I 986, 1987), and Becker ( 1986).
14.
•
122
5 • A D D I N G APPLES A N D O R A N G E S •
(13). These Mandarin examples are quantified here with the [-CLASS] unit classifier -ge, which is only used with count nouns, while the English examples are marked with the plural number marker -s. The two languages correspond fairly closely in these examples. ( 12)
sdn-ge
(13)
sdn-ge
three apple-s
pinguo
three-ucL1_ �cRJ apple 'three apples'
: :
pinguo-shiJ
three-UCL[- ACR) apple-tree 'three apple trees'
three apple-NUMB[PLJ 'three apples'
three apple-tree-s three apple.tree-NUMB[•tJ 'three apple trees'
5.3 Zero Anaphora16 Normally, true classifiers cannot be used 'absolutely' without an antecedent somewhere in the discourse, as seen in example (14), which is cited by Downing (1996: 63) as unacceptable. Without a noun antecedent, or without pointing to the real-life objects, the se mantic range of things that may be qualified by roru UCL[RoLL) (derived from the noun roru 'roll', a loanword from English) is too great.17 (14)
*Ni-roru
o sono hikidashi ni irete kudasai. 2- UCL[RotLJ ACC that drawer LOC insert please ?'Please put two rolls in that drawer.'
However, in some cases classifiers can occur absolutely-that is, without co-occurring nouns or previously occurring nominal antecedents to which they refer anaphorically. This is because such classifiers are considered by native speakers to be in a 1: 1 correspond ence with their nouns. In modern Japanese, these 'synonym classifi ers' are satsu UCL[souNo PuoucAnoNJ• used only for books and magazines; rilnin UCL[HUMANI• used only for people, and rna UCL[RooMJ• used only for rooms. These may be used absolutely, as in example (15), or ana phorically like any other classifier, as in ( 16).18
16. See also Chapte r Four on repeaters and zero anaphora. 17. The oldest of my three infonnants objected to the classifier use of r6111 'roll', considering it an unnaturalized noun; the younger two considered it quite normal.
18.
Downing ( 1996: 62-63, 160) does not explain this.
chikara-o awasete," translated as "gathering
Her
example
our strength into
"hito-tsu-ni
one," is not
•
(15)
FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES A N D TAXONOMY
Tanaka-san no
apdto
•
123
wa ji1ta-ma shika arimasen
Tanaka-HON GEN apartment TOP 2-ma only not.exist.HON 'Mr./Ms. Tanaka's apartment has only two rooms.' (16)
Daidokoro ga
kitchen
hito-ma to
NOM 1-ma
beddorfimu ga
and bedroom
NOM
hito-ma, zenbu de fota-ma arimasu 1-ma all LOC 2-ma exist.HON
'It has on e kitchen and one bedroom-two rooms in all.' The importance of anaphora is highlighted by frequency statistics. While 82% of all occurrences of the 36 different classifiers in Downing's corpus were of only five classifiers (Downing 1996: 18), a percentage that accords well with classifier frequency reported for other languages, in her study of a limited sample taken from the same corpus (Downing 1996: 168, 286 n. 1 1) she found that all anaphoric uses of classifiers were of the strictly taxonomic classifiers rilnin UCL[HuMAN) (48 out of 5 5 examples in her corpus), hiki UCL[ANI.MALsJ, wa UCL1o1RDs, RABBITst. and tsu U CLIINANIM ATE) (Downing 1996: 169, Table 6.1).20 It is notable that the classifiers in her sample largely have the actually an instance of the use of the classifier tsu UCL[tNANtMAT£]• although it may look like one; hitotsu ni here is a set adverbial phrase meaning 'together'. Her remaining example, shitsu 'room', a classifier for rooms, is a repeater or partial repeater (q.v. Chapter Four), by definition in a I : I relationship with its noun.
19. Although wa may theoretically be used for both birds and rabbits, only hiki is used for rabbits in actual speech. This appears to explain why my informants, and Downing's, disagreed about whether butterflies can be counted with wa (most say they cannot): all insects are classified as 'animals'. The meaning of the classifier wa as a noun is 'wing', so not surprisingly the most popular folk explanation for the inclusion of rabbits in the set of nouns that can take wa is 'because of their large, wing-like ears'. However, this is certainly a folk-etymology, only the most common of several such explanations, such as rabbit 'tastes like chicken', or rabbits 'hop !ike birds' (Downing 1996: 91), among others. Although usagi must go back to Common Japanese-Koguryoic-cf. Old Koguryo "'usiyarn *[usiga"] (Beckwith 2004: 254) -it could have been folk-etymologized in recent times as a compound consisting of two independent words, u 'cormorant' (also 'the Hare', a 12-year animal-cycle name) and sagi 'snowy heron', and could thus have acquired the
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5
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•
same referents that pronouns do, and exist within the same taxonomic animacy classification system.21 This is reminiscent of the noun class markers of Jacaltec, which have become the usual personal pronouns in that language (Craig 1986).
5.4 The Category of Jackets Japanese classifiers often seem to refer to the same kinds of things as do the gender-marked pronouns and (in words referring to humans) the portmanteau gender morphemes of many European languages. The gender categories in such languages are obligatory (the markers are morphologically fixed) and highly restricted in number (at the most, three genders are distinguished), so that they necessarily include incredibly heterogeneous assortments of things. The genders of the noun system as a whole in such languages are therefore not usually considered to be categories per se. This is the reason that gender is usually treated as one of the agreement features of morphological form-class markers, which refer to natural classes only when marking human referents, as discussed in Chapter Four. This brings up the question raised by the ancient grammarians 'What use is gender in language?' It is not really a trivial question, and it certainly has not been satisfactorily answered. The structure and grammatical relationships of gender systems are relatively well under stood (Corbett 1991 ), but the old question remains: Why, in French, should a table be feminine, and a book masculine, while in German usage: for example, an abstract number not referring to anything still normally takes tsu. In fact, tsu is used so often in counting (except for pure mathematics, for which the Chinese numerals are used,
sans classifiers) that the native
numerals from one to nine-the only numerals that can take tsu-have largely been reanalyzed as the basic forms. Use of the native numerals with classifiers other than tsu is mostly restricted to the numerals
hi(to)- 'one' andfu(ta)- 'two',
though mi- 'three' and yo-lyon- 'four' can also be used with rna, the classifier for 'rooms', and with tabi 'time(s)' and shina 'article(s), goods'.
2 1 . Japanese has often been noted for its aversion to using personal pronouns-some lengthy oral corpora include no occurrences at all (Downing I 996: 179). One of Downing's findings from her careful contrastive analysis of pronoun versus classifier usage is that pronouns tend to be preferred for short "striking distances," while classifiers are heavily preferred, almost to the exclusion of pronouns, for greater striking distances (Downing 1996: 1 78-185; 1986).
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the same table is masculine and the book neuter? Although �inguists have discovered a certain amount of predictability in the often seem ingly random gender assignment of words in German and other Euro pean languages (Unterbeck 2000a; Vogel 2000; Weber 2000; Zubin and Kopcke 1986), it is nevertheless agreed that gender assignment in these languages is primarily due not to semantics but to historical morphophonological change (Meillet 1964). The present chapter sug gests much the same point about classifiers. Yet despite the demon stration of the grammatical limits on categorization, it is evident that implied classifier categories, and some implied gender subcategories, do reflect similar patterns of cognition: nearly all systems include classifiers for extension in one, two, and three dimensions, animacy, etc. (Aikhenvald 2000: 271-305; Unterbeck et al. 2000; Craig 1994: 567; Zubin and Kopcke 1986). But there is still a problem with the theory, ultimately the very problem noted by the ancients: if individual noun referents belong to different semantic classes in different lan guages, how can they be windows into sublinguistic human cognition? Or, if classifiers reveal categories basic to human cognition, why do their referents belong to different categories in different languages? A great deal of effort, from Allan (1 977) to Grinevald and Seifart (2004), has been expended to show how classifier and noun class category sets are similar cross-linguistically. Thus it has indeed been shown that the kinds of classifier categories a language with classifiers is likely to have are very similar cross-linguistically, just as the kinds of gender categories that gender-marking languages are likely to have are very similar. Yet the classical question about the dissimilarity of actual class assignment in different languages, long noted for gender, has not been seriously examined with respect to classifiers. If classifi ers are assigned on the basis of the perception of salient real-world features of things, and thus reveal primitive human cognition, why are classifier 'categories' for the same things different in different lan guages? Why should a jacket be classified with tua UCL1,.."'M"LI in Thai, jiim UCL[ITEM] in Mandarin/2 and chaku UCL[cwnmwJ in Japanese? Is there no discernible, logical explanation for the cross-linguistic differ ences of the class marking implied by classifiers?
22.
One ccan add. English to the list too. The classifier jii m is used for clothing in
general in Mandarin, as in yijii m yifu one UCL[cLomES, NEws 1n.,s] clothin.g
of clothing'. lt is exactly synonymous with the classifier piece in English.
'a piece
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If things that have the same classifier assignment in most cases cannot be treated as the 'same sort of thing' either grammatically or semantically, as shown above, why should any language 'classify' at all? Why should one say in Hungarian, egy szem szolo 'one eye grape' instead Of *egy szolo 'one grape', Or in Thai, 1JUU ny1J /Ua 'snake one animal' instead of *1Juu nyiJ 'snake one', .or in English, one head of cattle instead of simply *one cattle? Since the taxonomic constraint shows that the overarching categories theoretically marked by classifi ers are not grammaticized, such constructions do indeed seem to be redundant, or at best to contain useless semantic information.23 Furthermore, natural taxonomy overrides any agreement system at the grammatical level. One cannot 'add oranges and bananas' even in languages (such as Thai) that 'classify' both nouns with a classifier for 'fruit', any more than in Russian it is possible to add one apel'sin or ange.NOM.SG.MASC 'orange' and one banan banana.NOM SG.MASC 'banana' and get 'two masculines' .24 The classifier classes and the gender classes are irrelevant in each instance. It is certainly possible to add heterogeneous things, but only by explicitly marking them as members of the superordinate level of THINGS, or a slightly lower but still superordinate level, such as, in this case, FRUITS. The rule that one can normally only add oranges and oranges would seem to affect all languages, but classifier languages do allow summation of 'different things' as long as they belong to a closely superordinate group taxo nomically, such as SPHERICAL MEDIUM-SIZED FRUITS. Because classi fiers are obligatory with numerals in virtually all classifier languages, wherein they perform the grammatical function of marking nouns for number, such a constraint on actually counting things with them is highly significant. The taxonomic constraint shows that despite the existence in language of grammaticized classification systems with implied semantically complex categories, human speakers' cognition involving nouns-or more accurately, the concrete real-world refer ents of nouns-is based not on these linguistic structures but rather on deep sublinguistic perceptions of and reactions to the real world. .
23.
Sec Chapter Four, s.v. classifier 'variation', for discussion of the cognitive selec tion theory of classifier assignment.
24.
Although plurals in 'gender languages' such as Russian virtually never dis tinguish gender categories, the summations are still unacceptable.
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When it comes to their putative classifying function, the catego ries of things to which classifiers may explicitly and grammatically refer are in fact limited by the taxonomic constraint to strict basic and subordinate level noun taxonomies, as shown in the above analysis of Japanese, and as may be shown just as easily for Mandarin and most other languages with obligatory classifier systems. These individual coherent categories with which classifiers agree are internally purely taxonomic, but classifiers themselves cannot function as or refer to overarching superordinate heads of more than one category at a time. From the point of view of their grammatical category classifiers are only one of several types of PHORONYM; the overarching categories that they imply are comparable to the unanalyzable heterogeneous categories implied by gender markers; and the actual occurrence of classifiers is largely restricted to a small handful of the theoretically available set in any given language. Therefore, the implied overarch ing classifier categories are the approximate equivalent of the morpho logical gender form classes found in European languages. The similarity extends also to function. Not only are the 'form classes' or 'agreement classes' of 'classifier languages' similar to gen der form classes in 'gender languages', the classifier is a portmanteau morpheme very much like the portmanteau declensional morphemes in Russian and German, or perhaps even more so those of French, which has lost its inherited overt case marking. Leaving aside case, then, both classifier and gender portmanteau morphemes embody the same two features in both types of language: semantic AGREEMENT class (e.g., classifier category in Mandarin, gender category in Rus sian) and NUMBER specification. Noun classification is thus directly connected to number agreement in both morphological types. Since English phoronyms, including classifiers, actually do have overt pseu dopartitive case marking (see Chapter Two), the comparison between the two classification systems could hardly be closer. The features proper to classifiers in Mandarin are as inseparable from their occurrence in pseudopartitive constructions as the features of declensional morphemes in Russian or Latin are inseparable from their occurrence as fusional nominal and qualifier suffixes. From a morphological point of view, the classifiers found in Asian 'agglutina tive' and 'isolating' languages (q.v. Beckwith 2006a) can thus be con sidered the functional and semantic type-equivalents of the portman teau gender-number or European-type gender-number-case markers.
• 6 • Y 0 U R
H· 0 N 0 R A B L E
T E A •
Classifying Qualifier Terms Although
MENSURAL PHORONYMS do occur in Tibetan, there are no unit
classifiers, and instead of pseudopartitive constructions with group classi fiers,
CLASS NOUNS are used. Noun categorization can occur in either the
class term or the qualifier term of class nouns. The categorization system implied by the
HONORIFIC QUALIFIER TERMS of Tibetan class nouns has been
compared to classifier categorization. The Tibetan system examined in this chapter is shown to be different from classifier systems in both form and function, and to be related instead to gender.
L
inguistic noun classification systems evidently all occur as portmanteau features of morphemes with another primary function that is somehow related to the particular type of semantic categorization performed by the morphemes in question (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Grinevald 2000, Craig 1994).1 Unit classifiers, which perform the primary grammatical function of specifying noun referents for number, categorize nouns primarily according to salient physical characteristics of the occurrence of the referent as a whole unit. Group classifiers, which perform the primary function of specifiying a plurality of nominal referents, categorize them according to salient characteristics of their occurrence in groups, or according to their membership in taxonomic groups. It is thus not surprising that classification within an honorific system-which has the primary function of marking personal deixis according to real world social levels, or 'registers', identified with focus humans-is connected semantically to the human body and body-centered 'kinesthetic image schemas' (Lakoff 1986, 1 987; Johnson 1987).
I.
The typological study by Aikhenvald (2000), who follows Grinevald here, clearly shows this as well, though she seems not to make the point explicitly.
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Unlike some other Asian languages that have honorifics, such as Japanese and Thai, Tibetan has no classifiers,2 though it does of course have PHORONYMS, which occur as expected in pseudopartitive con structions, as shown in examples ( 1 1 ) through (14) below. Instead, Tibetan has a remarkable system of honorific class nouns in which the categories implied by the honorific qualifying constituents have been said to parallel the categories implied by typical Asian classifier sys tems (DeLancey 1998; Lyovin 1992; Kitamura 1975). Use in a sen tence of a word marked for register generally tends to trigger covert honorific (register) agreement that can include an entire sentence. Though concordia! repetition of particular class markers can occur, it is purely fortuitous.3 However, the extent of honorific marking, and therefore of agreement, is up to the speaker's choice and ability to use the system fully. While this performance factor is not found with the obligatory concordial gender systems of European, Semitic, and Afri can languages, it is typical of Asian classifier systems.
6.1 Tibetan Class Noun Structure The Tibetan honorific classification system is a subcategory within the class noun category, and thus ultimately within the category of com pound nouns. In Tibetan, as in English (Ryder 1994; Warren 1978), compounds may be constructed in many ways.4 For example, there are polar compounds, such as lama (phama) 'parents', from the noun stems pha (pha) 'father' plus ma (rna) 'mother', ri"tuu (ril)thu!J) 'length, height', from the adjective stems ru (riiJ) 'long' and luu (thu!J) 'short', as well as synonym compounds, additive compounds,
2.
This is true also for Old Tibetan and Classical Tibetan, but not for the eastern (Kharns) and northeastern (Amdo) Tibetan dialects or languages (K.risadawan Hongladarom, p.c., 2004), perhaps due to contact with Chinese or other languages with classifiers.
3.
Though it is arguable that register agreement per se in Tibetan sentences is thus a · form of gender concord, the fact that it is not obligatory and there is n o regular overt morphological marking would seem to rule out such an interpretation.
4.
There is no standard transcription system for any variety of Tibetan. My transcription of Lhasa dialect Tibetan, transcribed in italics, marks long vowels by doubling the vowel and indicates the pitch accent by means of the literary Tibetan spelling, which is transliterated in parentheses after each form.
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•
verb-noun compounds, and so on (Goldstein 1977: 13-22; 1984: xi xiv).s Among these many types, Tibetan has extensive sets of class nouns in which the head of the compound is a class term. Consider the class nouns built on the class term k"aa (khal)), the combining form of khampa (khal)pa) 'building'. as shown in examples ( I ) through (4). (I)
h
1u- (bsdu-) + k aa- (khaiJ-)
>
to gather
building 'assembly hall'
(2)
sa- (za-)
+
lukaa (bsdukhaiJ) gather-building
khaa- (khaiJ-) > sakaa (zakhalJ)
to eat building restaurant'
eat-building
'
(3)
II'aa (chaiJ) + khaa- (khal)-) > Jtd'kaa (cha1Jkha1J) beer building beer-building 'bar'
(4)
/ha ( lha) + khaa- (khal)-) /ha6 building
>
lhakaa (lhakhaiJ) /ha-building
'temple' Class terms (q.v. Chapter Seven) function morphologically and se mantically like English gender suffixes, but the number and kinds of classes that may occur in class nouns are practically unlimited. Tibetan class nouns are right-headed in morphological structure i.e., the qualifier precedes the head of the compound, as in English. This order of constituents seems at first glance to be irregular, since syntactically Tibetan is a verb-final language with left-headed NPs (in which simple qualifiers follow the noun head), as shown in Figure 12. (N-GEN-)" [[N) (+-Adj) (+-Num] [+-Oet])-CASE Figure 12. Direction of modification in Tibetan noun phras.es
However, a noun in the genitive case obligatorily precedes the noun it modifies. Moreover, Tibetan uses the genitive case not only to subor dinate one noun to another noun (actually, one NP to another NP,
5.
Tibetan compound nouns are an extremely interesting, very substantial body of material that includes many different subtypes in addition to class nouns.
6.
The word /ha [ta], usually mistranslated 'god' or 'deity', means something like 'supramundane being'. It occurs in the modem name of Tibet's capital city, Lhasa ('/ha-place'),
•
CLASSIFYING Q U A L I F I E R TERMS
•
131
since all case marking is phrase-fmal), as in Figure 12 and example (5), but to subordinate anything nominalizable to a noun. (5)
kun c@ t/'empolfiki naa Ia (gser-gyi sku-fidra chenpo-iig-gi naiJ Ia) gold-GEN HQTruoovl-likeness big one-GEN inside at 'inside a big golden religious statue'
seeki
It is thus used to fonn relative clauses as well. Since all qualifying constituents (including adjective stems and verb stems) are treated as nouns when they occur in class nouns, this suggests that the traditional explanation of the structure of class nouns in Tibetan-that the order of constituents follows that of genitive modification and class nouns are simply contractions of genitive phrases-is correct, because nouns, as well as nominalized verbs and adjectives, are indeed all treated the same. (This is not necessarily true diachronically; some dictionary ex planations are imaginary expansions of already existing class nouns.) The order of constituents in class nouns, Qualifier - Class Tenn, is· thus the same whether the qualifier constituent is a nominal or not. However, since classifying qualifier tenns in Tibetan are always the first constituent in their compounds, they do coincide fonnally with the position of the nonnal head of a simple NP. 7 If the final position is a genitive marker, the entire NP is subordinated to the following noun head, producing a complex NP, and so on indefinitely, as in Figure 13. ((Pro!N-GEN-]" (N] (-Adj] (-Num] (-Det]]-GEN- ((NP]-GEN-)" Figure 13. Order of Constituents in Extended Tibetan NPs
6.2 Class Term Categories Cross-linguistically, the categorization done by class tenns is fonnally akin to the noun class (or gender) type both morphologically and semantically, insofar as the categories can be fairly strict or extremely heterogeneous taxonomically. Class tenns are in general strikingly different from classifiers in the kinds of categories they set up.
7.
The syntax o f Tibetan is complex and deserves more attention. For a formal study see Agha (1993). For analysis of aspects of Tibetan syntax and the native grammatical tradition, with an extensive bibliography, see Zeisler (2004, 2006).
132
6
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•
The lack of consistent agreement between classifiers and most class terms in Thai is remarkable (DeLancey 1986), despite the use of many class terms as classifiers (and vice versa). In fact, classifier agreement is generally based on salient physical features (or kines thetic image schemas) of the real-world referent of the class noun as a whole, regardless of the class term's etymological origin. However, in some cases the class term and the classifier are identical and overt concordia! agreement occurs (q.v. Chapter Eight). In Tibetan, which lacks classifiers, syntactic agreement occurs not according to lexical semantic parameters but according to register lev els, and tends to be marked on most constituents of a sentence, includ ing not only nouns but also adjectives, verbs, and even adverbs (not including case markers, conjunctions, and other purely functional forms). Moreover, although in Thai the classification marked by the honorific constituents of class nouns is similar to that marked by clas sifier constituents, in Tibetan the honorific constituents are always qualifier terms. The semantic head of the Tibetan compound is thus a non-honorific noun stem that occurs in the second constituent position (which would be the qualifier position in an NP); for clarity's sake it is referred to here as the HEAD TERM rather than as the class term (which functionally is what it is in honorific class nouns). The qualifier term, when honorific, is the locus of the noun classification system. How ever, although an honorific qualifier term or any other honorific con stituent in a sentence can trigger morphosyntactic register agreement, it is covert agreement, not concord. In Tibetan only very rarely-and then purely fortuitously-does formal, overt morphological concord occur. Perhaps significantly, both Thai and Tibetan are left-headed languages, and in both the locus of the class-marking is in the first constituent; but in Tibetan, unlike Thai, the head of non-honorific class nouns is nearly always the second constituent.
6.3 Register Class in Tibetan The Tibetan lexicon can be divided into two basic categories with respect to register: unmarked and marked. Most grammatical function words as well as the bulk of the vocabulary are unmarked and unmark able for register. Marked words include those assigned to various sociolinguistic levels, from abjectly humble to the highest honorific
•
CLASS IFYING QUALIFIER TERMS
•
133
level used when addressing the Dalai Lama. Some marked words are not morphologically distinguishable from unmarked words; their register status is assigned lexically, e.g., lakpa (lagpa) 'handlarm1-HoNJ , , vs. t/'aa (phyag) 'handlarm1+HoNJ . Most honorifics, however, are class nouns overtly marked by the inclusion of an honorific qualifier term implying categories based on kinesthetic image schemas or salient physical features. Since these honorifics constitute a type of noun categorization system, the extent of their usage (and also the extent of register agreement in a sentence) is subject to sociolinguistic and cognitive manipulation similar to that found in classifier languages.8 Although there are a few forms that mark higher honorific levels, and a few that mark a lower, humble level, the vast maj ority of marked words are honorific, most commonly one level above the normal non honorific (urunarked) level. In the remainder of this chapter, only ordinary honorific [+HON] and unmarked
[-HON] forms are discussed.
6.4 Tibetan Honorific Class Nouns Class nouns with honorific qualifier terms9 and non-honorific class term heads are the most common subtype. Consider kunqp HQT[soovt likeness 'religious statue1+HoNJ ' in (5), and (7) through (10). Honorific class terms are also possible, producing doubly-marked class nouns. Whether honorific or not, the class terms of Tibetan class nouns set up their own form classes headed by the class term. But while the class term is the grammatical head of the compound and thus the for mal marker of an ordinary class term-like category, which is usually taxonomic in structure, the qualifier term is the register class head of the class noun and also marker of one of many classifier-like sub classes within the register class,10 as shown in Figure
8.
14.
Cf. the Tibetan verbal agreement system, which cannot be defined completely without reference to evidentials (Hongladarom 1993, 1996). In both systems manipulation of the surface forms ofthe language is itselfgrammaticized.
9.
Lyovin ( 1 992: 46 n. 3) correctly notes that the qualifier terms are not really prefixes: "More accurately, we should refer to these
as
'prefixed elements' since
they are clearly still root morphemes, not affixes." 10. It also marks the deictic category [-SELF] (Beckwith 1992a). On grammatical implications of the self: other di.chotomy in Tibetan. see Zeisler (2004, 2006).
134
6 • Y O U R H O N O R A B L E TEA •
[[QUALIFIER TERM][+HON, +cLASS)-[CLASS TERM ][±HON, -<:LASS]]](+ HON, +ClASS) Figure 14. Structure of Tibetan Honorific Class Nouns
In Thai, the class term is normally the morphological head of the class noun, and thus the head of its own semantic form-class. As quite a few class terms are also classifiers (DeLancey 1 986), concord often occurs in Thai pseudopartitive constructions, as in example (6): (6)
khryalj-yon
nyiJ khryaiJ
implemenl(0rJ-vehiclerCTJ one UCL[IMPLEMENrJ 'one motor' It is significant that in Tibetan honorific class nouns, morphemes which can be used as an honorific qualifier term (i.e., as the first constituent) cannot be used as the class term (i.e., the second constituent).11 When used in a class noun, an honorific qualifier term raises the entire word to the honorific register level. Each honorific qualifier term overtly marks a form class as well as a semantic category within the honorific class term system as a whole. These Tibetan categories, while somewhat reminiscent of Asian classifier type categories (DeLancey 1998; Kitamura 1975), are clearly organ ized largely around kinesthetic image schemas such as those described by Lakoff (1986, 1987) and Johnson (1 987). In any case, as noted by Lyovin ( 1992: 46) they are not based on salient features of physical appearance. This difference appears to be due to the primary function of honorifics in Tibetan, deixis (Beckwith l992a), and also to their secondary function, deference (DeLancey 1998; Lyovin 1 992). Honorific class nouns have in common with classifiers the direct involvement of sociolinguistic and cognitive factors in their actual use. Their use in Tibetan is variable from speech community to speech community, situation to situation, and speaker to speaker. However, as with classifier usage, the variation is essentially the choice whether to use an honorific, how many honorifics to use, and so forth. The class term categorization itself is fundamentally an established, fixed sys tem, just as classifier assignment is not, on the whole, really variable.
I I . Lyovin (1992: 50) cites one "example of a 'prefix •,
"
rare
honorific 'suffix' rather than a
khyee (mkhyen) in 1]60/cyei) (ml)on-mkhyen), which he contrasts with
IJOO/ee (ml)onses), both meaning 'clairvoyance'-not his "foreknowledge," which would be (siJonses) and (siJonmkhyen). However, khyee (mkhyen) 'knowledge1uoNJ' is not used as a qualifier term, so this is not an exception.
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CLASSIFYING QUALIFIER T E R M S
135
•
6.5 Kinesthetic Image Schemas and Tibetan Class Nouns Tibetan honorific class nouns and their qualifier terms have been treated in extenso in several good studies that include long lists of forms (DeLancey 1998; Lyovin 1992; Kitamura 1975), so one exam ple will suffice here. The honorific class nouns for objects connected with eating and drinking (food, drink, utensils, furniture, etc.) can be marked by one of several honorific qualifier terms, including .fiiii (zal) 'mouth1"0"1' (e.g., fiiiikaa (ial-kar) 'cup, bowl1HoN1', from fiiii + kaayoo (dkaryol) 'cup, bowl'), fee (hies) 'to eat1Ho�<J' (e.g., feetsiiii (bzestshal) 'food1"0"1', from fee + tiaa (tshal) 'vegetables; dish [of cooked food]'), and soo (gsol) 'to swallow1HoNl'. Examples of honorific class nouns formed with soo (gsol) are given in (7) through ( I 0). (7)
SOOt[Q 'tearuoNl' • from: SQQ (gSOl) + !Ia (ja) 'tea'
(8)
tiii (tshigs) jood'12 SOOt[�� 'tableruoNl' , from: SOO (gsol) + tf;J� (leog) 'tab)e' I)
(9)
suiilsii 'dinner.joodrHo.vJ ',.from: s66 (gsol)
+
h (10) s66tap 'hearth, kitchen1uoN1• , from: s66 (gsol) + t ap (thab) 'hearth, .4
The honorific class nouns in (7) through (10) refer to the entire situa tion of people eating and drinking at table. This is thus a kinesthetic image schema par excellence. The difference between the categori zation in these examples and that in their Chinese equivalents is strik ing. It is unlikely that any classifier in spoken Mandarin would include such disparate items as those in examples (7) through ( l 0) in the same category. In fact, in Mandarin, prepared 'tea' regularly takes the mensural classifier bei, as in yi bei cha one MCL[cuP, cLAss) tea ' a cup of
,
12. The class term, tshii (tshigs) 'food [lioN) written as if it were the Tibetan word 'joint (of bone, bamboo, etc.)' is probably a borrowing from a Chinese dialect; cf. NMan cai [tshajJ, dial. [tshe:] 'vegetables; dish of prepared food'. The vowel shift in the first syllable is due to Tibetan regressive vowel assimilation (usually referred to somewhat inaccurately as 'vowel harmony').
13. The class term (,, (lcog) is the compounding form of (:Jktse (lcogtse) 'table', a borrowing from an earlier or dialect form of Chinese (cf. NMan zhuozi 'table') written in Tibetan with a folk-etymologized spelling. 14. The class term thap 'hearth' also occurs in the non-honorific class noun (thabtsha!J) 'kitchen• .
thaptsiiii
136
6 •
Y O U R HONORABLE TEA
•
tea'; 'dinner, food, prepared meal' with the mensural classifier dim, as in yi dim ji m one MCLtruRN) food 'one meal'; 'table' with the sortal unit classifier zhang, as in yi zhang zhuozi one UCLtflAr) table 'a table'; and 'kitchen' with -ge, as in yige chufi mg one UCLt-eLASSJ kitchen 'a kitchen'. The difference is that a Mandarin classifier is mostly assigned on the basis, ultimately, of the 'kind' of thing a noun referent is, while a Tibetan class term is generally assigned on the basis of how people use the noun referent. 15 There is also a major grammatical difference that distinguishes classifiers and Tibetan honorific qualifier terms. Honorific qualifier terms are permanently attached to the class term heads of their com pounds and are not themselves subject to sociolinguistic or cognitive manipulation. That is, they are no more morphologically flexible than are the independent lexically honorific nouns, verbs, and so on that are not specially marked morphologically (such as t/'aa (phyag) 'hand, arm[uoNJ' versus the non-honorific equivalent Jakpa (lagpa) 'id.', and tshem (tshems) 'tooth 1HoNJ' versus the non-honorific equivalent so (so) 'id. '). This means that Tibetan honorific qualifier terms are more simi lar to gender markers than to classifiers morphologically, and brings up the fact that Tibetan has third person pronominal gender, unlike most East and Southeast Asian languages, which-if they have any pronominal gender at all-usually mark the first and second person.
6.6 Gender in Tibetan As shown above, Tibetan gender is purely covert (non-concordial) natural sex marking, as in English. It is obligatory in the non-honorific third person pronouns, i.e., ll'o 'he', mo 'she', and derived forms, including plurals. By contrast, the honorific third-person pronoun, ll'oo (kholJ) 'he/she [HON] ' is specifically unmarked for gender. There are a few gender-marked nouns referring to humans, such as I? upo (rgyalpo) 'king' and Jtumo (rgyalmo) 'queen'. Animal terms may
1 5.
Kitamura's
( 1 975) observation
that Tibetan class term categories are similar to
classifier categories is nevertheless relevant in some cases. For example, the Mandarin classifier bd (derived from bti 'to hold') is used to count umbrellas, knives, chairs, and other things that are manipulated by the hand.
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137
also be marked, e.g., laa (phag) 'pig' and phaamo (phagmo) 'sow', but such forms are today either literary or restricted to proper names. In Pre-Old Tibetan the suffix morphemes po -pho 'male' and mo 'female' were the productive adjectival markers of natural gender. To day Tibetans still use the same morphemes, lo 'male' or mo 'female', as productive gender markers, but now they are preposed qualifier terms within class nouns in which the head term is the term for the animal (and also the class term), e.g., loki 'male dog' and mold 'fe h male dog' from p o (pho) or mo (mo) plus /!'; (khyi) 'dog', lota (phorta) 'stallion' and mota (morta) 'mare' from ta (rta) 'horse', etc. This is strikingly similar to class nouns in Thai (q.v. Chapter Seven). Grammaticized noun classification in Tibetan is thus exclusively of the gender type morphologically. One cannot fail to be impressed by the historical consistency of the language in this regard.
6. 7 Diachronic Analysis The fact that Japanese seems to have borrowed from Chinese more or less its entire classifier system (including most of the classifiers them selves), along with a tremendous quantity of cultural baggage and the vocabulary attached thereto, 16 would tend to make one suspect a simi lar influence on Tibetan also. Yet unlike Japanese, Tibetan has no classifiers. A count noun is counted with a simple numeral, e.g., !!'i iiii (khyi gfiis) dog two 'two dogs', s:J:Jmo fo (sormo do) finger two 'two fingers'. As shown by these examples, plural marking is not obligatory; it is rare in Tibetan except with pronouns.17 Although the language does indeed have phoronyms and pseudopartitive construc tions, as shown in examples (I I) through (14), there are alternatives to them for many common situations. For example, 'a cup of tea' 1s typically rendered as tsha !!'aa (ja gaiJ) tea one 'one tea'.
1 6 , This is true also for Korean and some Southeast Asian languages, including Thai (DeLancey 1986). 17. In addition to the usual numerals, which have been borrowed in toto from Old Chinese (Beckwith 2002a), Tibetan has two etymologically distinct numeral forms for 'one' and 'two'-khal) (gal)) 'one' and
tho (do)-which
may perhaps
be the remnants of a native Tibetan numeral system; they tend to be used mainly in measure expressions such as those in the above examples.
138
6
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Y O U R HONORABLE TEA
•
.), { 1 1 ) c a kaay66 sum (gso1ja dkaryol gsum) tea cup three 'three cups of tea'
kaay66 sum (gsolja dkaryol gsum)
(12) sooja
tea[HosoRJrlc) cup
three '(non-first person's) three cups oftea
'
(13) biraa seedam cik (sbirag seldam gcig) beer bottle one 'a bottle ofbeer'
.), (14) c emakara kyama cik (byemakara rgyama gcig) sugar pound one 'a pound of sugar'
Moreover, as noted above, Tibetan uses class noun constructions rather than group classifier pseudopartitive constructions. In particular, collections of animals are expressed with class nouns, e.g., luuiC'u (lugkhyu) 'herd of sheep' from luu (lug) 'sheep' + IC'u (khyu) 'herd', and taiC'u (rtak.hyu) 'herd of horses' from ta (rta) 'horse' + flu (khyu) 'herd'. Based on the Tibeto-Burman evidence and the above-described gender-like phenomena in the pronominal and adjectival systems, pre Old Tibetan must have had natural gender agreement overtly marked on the adjective,18 as still exists in some neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages.19 The fact that modem Tibetan's complex type of categori zation via class nouns is typologically closest to gender-like phenom-
\8. Due to the overt gender morpheme, it was at least semi-concordia\.
19. Modem Qiang, though it belongs to a different branch of Tibeto-Burrnan, has some grammatical features in common with Tibetan, but like most other Tibeto Burrnan languages it has classifiers. Vajda (2005) gives a succinct summary in his review of LaPolla and Huang's (2003) book on northern Qiang: "Nouns lack grammatical gender, though certain derivational suffixes identify living beings as biologically male or female. Noun stems may consist of single roots or contain two nouns, with the modifying noun always preceding its semantic head. Numerals follow
the
noun and must in tum be followed by a classifier
morpheme. Simple adjectives also follow their head noun, though relativized modifiers as well as possessive nouns marked in the genitive preceded the head noun.
A chart
genitive phrase marker
+
(39) gives the general structure of the noun phrase as follows: +
relative clause + NOUN + adjective + demonstrative or definite
(numeral + classifier)/plural suffix." This is identical to Tibetan NP syntax with the exception that in Tibetan the numeral must precede a
demonstrative.
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CLASSIFYING Q U A L I F I E R TERMS
•
139
ena is thus not so surprising. Tibetan creates deverbal nouns with the same syllabic suffix, pa, which is used to form denominal 'occupa tion' nouns. The language has an overwhelming preference for disyl labic words, and in general marks grammatical class with the non-root element in such words. Both the Old Tibetan suffixing system as well as the New Tibetan prefixing (class noun) system thus agree well with gender systems constructed with relatives of po and mo in other Ti beto-Burman languages. In addition, it is notable that in spoken Ti betan both types of categorization (gender and honorific class nouns) occur in conjunction not with number specification, as in classifier systems, but with deixis. The honorifics function primarily as deictic pronoun substitutes, to the extent that while the honorific function is important, exceptions regularly occur (Kitamura 1975) because the honorific function is overridden by deixis (Beckwith 1992a). A curious feature of the Tibetan numeral system is that each num ber in a given decade includes a distinctive decade-class marker used only for that particular decade-e.g., so (so) in the thirties, fe (ze) in the forties, etc.-in a construction that looks superficially similar to a pseudopartitive construction. For example, fiptfu fefi (b:Zibcu :lebzi) 'forty-four', analyzed etymologically, contains the multiplicative nu meral fiptfu (bzibcu)-from fi (bzi) 'four + tfu (bcu) 'ten'-'forty', plus fe (ze) 'fourth decade marker', plus fi (bzi) 'four'. Because of the redundancy of fiptfu, the numeral is often shortened (in a manner strikingly like phoronym anaphora) to fefi, which still means 'forty four'. In many classifier languages, decade markers are used as PHO RONYMS in numbers larger than ten. In view of the comparative historical evidence, therefore, it is likely that Tibetan once had classi fiers but lost them before the language was first written in the seventh century. The apparent fall into disuse of most honorifics in Tibetan speech communities under cultural and linguistic assault appears to be another similarity with the fate of classifying phenomena in other languages in similar situations, particularly those undergoing language death (Er baugh 1986; Dixon 1986; Mithun 1986).
• 7 • W O L F P A C K S
&
B U S I N E S S W O M E N •
Class Terms and Gender CLASS TERMS, the formal internal heads of CLASS NOUNS, can be drawn from various lexical categories. In Thai, some class terms are classifiers, and the resulting class nouns take concordia! classifier agreement. Also, certain ex tended noun phrases obligatorily take CONCORDIAL CLASSIFIER MARKING. This chapter reexamines these phenomena are analyzed and the diachronic theories that have been propo.sed for Thai classifier development.
I
n some languages it is often possible to choose freely between a PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION and an alternative construction where the PHORONYM is used as the class term head of a class noun, a type of compound noun. (See Appendix E.) For example, in English one can !:ay either a pack of wolves or a wolfpack. The compound noun wolfpack is a class noun in which wolf qualifies the class term pack. (The only practical difference, other than a slight shift in focus, is a side-effect, the despecification of the qualifier term wolf.) Class nouns are structurally similar to gender, and in languages with obligatory classifiers, such as Thai, gender-type concord can result (Aikhenvald 2000: 372; Beckwith 1997). Although the occurrence of such concord is different from that in 'gender languages' such as Latin and Russian in several respects, there is no significant difference between it and the concord of 'gender languages', when it does occur. FormaHy speaking, the class noun is a type of compound noun.1 Compound nouns may be constructed in several ways, such as syno-
I.
Aikhenvald (2000: 86-87, 214, 372) discusses class nouns briefly in her discussion of noun class markers, which she calls 'noun classifiers', following Grinevald (Craig 1977), but her discussion is misleading. Noun class markers are morphemes which co-occur in the same noun phrase with the nouns they classify semantically; they are unrelated to phoronyms, class nouns, etc.; cf. Appendix
E.
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CLASS TERMS A N D G E N D E R
•
141
nym or polar compounds, additive compounds, verb-noun compounds, and so on (Ryder 1994; Warren 1978). As noted in Chapter Siix, com pound nouns become specifically class nouns when they are formed from two elements of which one, the CLASS TERM (a nominal), repre sents a class, and the other (frequently but by no means always a nominal) functions as the QUALIFIER TERM. The head ofthe compound is normally a noun, nominal stem, or nominalized stem. Class nouns are a relatively open-ended category, which fact may account for it being perhaps the most overlooked or misunderstood type o f noun classification system.2 It is true that the existence of class nouns in a language does not necessarily indicate the existence of grarnmaticized agreement systems such as those of the classifier type; however, just as there is no formal distinction between classifiers and other phoro nyms in isolation, there is none between grammaticized and non grammaticized class nouns, even in languages such as Thai, where grammaticized agreement of the classifier type occurs with class nouns just as with nearly all other nouns.3 Moreover, although class nouns are very familiar to speakers of Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Viet namese, and many other languages, including English and other Euro pean languages, they are rare in some other languages, such as Mon golian and Evenki, both of which are highly agglutinative throughout their morphological structure and have very few compound nouns.
7.1 English Class Nouns and Gender English has many non-grammaticized class nouns. For example, the class term way is formally the head of its compound and of a class [WAY] in the class nouns railway, byway, passageway, leeway,
freeway, expressway, highway, throughway, runway, tramway, subway, and so on. In this list of examples built on way, which is by
2. 3.
Lyons ( 1 977: 534-550) discusses "compound Jexemes" at length, but does not mention class noun-like phenomena. Some common nouns, especially abstract nouns and loanwords, do not take classifiers in Thai; see Chapter Four. On other supposed nouns that do not take classifiers, many of which belong to the distinct grammatical category of AUTOMEASURES (which are analyzed alternatively by some as classifiers that do not take nouns), see Appendix A .
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7 • WOLFPACKS AND BUSINESSWOMEN
•
no means exhaustive, the qualifier terms include nouns, adjectives, a verb, prepositions, and a prefix. The sense of class is easier to under stand if the English class term woman in the class nouns businesswo man, saleswoman, policewoman, and so on, which belong to the class [WOMAN], is compared to the natural gender suffix -ess in stewardess, actress, and songstress, which belong to a [HUMAN FEMALE] or (wo MAN] class. The two groups of nouns are functionally identical in structure, the main differences being that the -ess class is partially grammaticized and has recently developed negative connotations for some speakers.4 The class terms of English class nouns function mor phologically and semantically as taxonomic class heads but also like English gender suffixes. The difference is that the number and kinds of classes that may occur in class nouns are practically unlimited.
7.2 Folk Taxonomies and Class Nouns Non-scientific, everyday taxonomic categorizations, such as the one shown in Figure 15, exist in all languages, and are a fundamental characteristic of human language in general (Rosch 1973, 1977).
instrument
SUPERORDINATE LEVEL
� piano I I alto flute grandpiano flute
BASIC LEVEL
SUBORDINATE LEVEL
concertflute piccolo
baby grand spinet
Figure 15. Partial folk taxonomy of instrument
As Rosch has shown, fol k taxonomies are both hierarchical and focused on central prototypes. For example, in the BIRD taxonomy,
4.
Some American women avoid using words belonging to the -ess class, preferring instead the
woman
class, which has developed positive connotations for them,
despite the fact that both mark the noun as feminine. The rationale may be that ess often derives feminine nouns from nouns that either refer de facto to occupational terrns for males or are explicitly masculine, while -woman derives
feminine nouns primarily from nouns referring to occupations themselves.
•
CLASS
TERMS
AND G E N D E R
•
143
robins, sparrows, and so forth are at the center of the prototype, swans and pelicans somewhat further out, and ostriches and penguins are at the edge of it. Folk taxonomies can usually be further extended in both directions vertically, and can be treated as semantic classes. They may be connected semantically (and to some extent even formally) to partially or fully grammaticized types of noun classification. In English, many compounds with noun heads belong to taxo nomic form classes. For example, the taxonomic category SNAKE, which is the basic level noun in a folk taxonomy with the superordi nate level noun REPTILE, a super-superordinate level noun ANIMAL, and so on upward, includes at the subordinate level rattlesnake, grass snake, blacksnake, copperhead, python, cobra, and so on (cf. De Lancey 1 986) Among these, the compound nouns which have snake as their class term constitute a taxonomic fonn class akin to gender classes, as in the examples cited above with woman as their class term. However, in English (unlike Mandarin and Tihai), many folk taxono mies consist of subordinate-level members with few, if any, class terms at all. For example, the noun residence is the superordinate head of a taxonomy including, at the basic level, the nouns house, palace, trailer, igloo, and so on. Each of these nouns is also the head of a class with subordinate level nouns of its own, for example, the taxon omy of the HOUSE class includes bungalow, Cape Cod, ranch, split level, and so forth. The semantic structure of these hierarchies, which have little or no morphology in common, have been studied in detail by Rosch ( 1977), Lakoff ( 1 987), and many others. .
7.3 Thai Class Nouns and Classifiers Identification of class nouns in Thai is more transparent than in English because Thai is a left-headed language and an ordinary dic tionary provides rough lists of class nouns of various types. Thai also allows construction of class nouns with heads from different cate gories (i.e., not nouns exclusively, as in English), including classifiers. For example, one of the most productive class terms used in Thai class nouns is khrfa1J, a sortal unit classifier with a very wide range of reference focusing on the notion of 'equipment'. There are thus many class nouns constructed with khryal) as class term, yet by no means do
144
7
•
WOLFPACKS AND BUSINESSWOMEN
•
all of them take khrjatJ as their classifier, as shown by the small selection of examples given in Table 10. The class nouns in Table I 0 apparently belong to unrelated taxo nomic categories and different taxonomic levels; the fact that they all have the same class term has nothing to do with their folk taxonomy. Moreover, if they are grouped on the basis of their classifier agree ment, there seem to be three classes: lam, used for cylindrical objects and boats; chin, which is used for portable objects; and khryatJ. Table 10. Class nouns with the class term khryay 'equi pment' CLASS NOUN
khryaJ)bin khryOJ;dontrii khryOJ;yon khryaJ)myy khryaJ)phimdiit khryaiJpradap
QUALIFIER
CLASS NOUN
TERM GLOSS
GLOSS
'to fly'
'airplane'
'music'
'instrument'
' veh icle'
'motor'
'hand'
'implement'
'to type'
'typewriter'
lam chin khryOI) chin khryal)
'to decorate'
'ornament'
chin
CLASSIFIER
CLASSIFIER CATEGORY
cylindrical portable equipment portable equipment portable
Each of these class nouns is also the head of a folk taxonomy of its own consisting of nouns mostly unrelated by form to either khryal) or chin. Consider, for example, Table I I , which gives a random selection of basic level nouns belonging to the taxonomy of the superordinate level noun khrya!JdOntrii 'musical instrument' (which itself takes the classifier chin UCL[PORTAB�EJ). Table 11. Taxo n omy of klzryaydontrii 'musical instrument' NOUN
NOUN
CLASSIFIER
GLOSS
khlilj
picno S:J:J kb:JI)
'flute'
law
'piano' 'Thai fiddle'
la1J
'drum'
CLASSIFIER
CATE·
GORY
khan liiuk
reeds, flutes house lik e -
with handle(s) fruits; 3D objects
Each of the basic level nouns in Table 1 1 is also the head of its own taxonomy, many of the members of which are class nouns with a basic level noun as the head constituent, as shown in Table 1 2. The examples in Table 12 take the same classifier as the basic level noun S:J:J 'Thai fiddle', namely khan. The same is true for virtually all other taxonomies of nouns below the basic level in Thai and in other
•
CLASS TERMS AN[) G E N DER
145
•
classifier languages. This fact confirms Rosch 's ( 1 977) finding that subordinate level nouns do not provide much, if any, additional infor mation about external physical shape beyond that provided by the basic level head of the taxonomy.
Table 12. Subordinate level nouns, class term soo 'Thai fiddle' CLASS NOUN GLOSS QUALIFIER TERM SUBORDINATE GLOSS LEVEL CLASS NOUN
CLASSIFIER
s:xJ dum; s:J:J ?uu S:J:J saam saai
khan khan khan
treble fiddle
bamboo trap
alto fiddle
loud
three-string fiddle
three string
Shape is the most salient feature not only of semantic noun categories, or folk taxonomies, but also most classifier categories. Even though all the instruments listed in Table I I belong to the taxonomy headed by khryal)dontrii 'musical instrument', which takes the classifier chin, they do not take the classifier chin; in fact, each of them actually takes a different classifier. Similarly, the three basic level nouns in Table 10, khryal)bin 'airplane' (with the classifier lam), khryal)yon 'motor' (with the classifier khryaiJ), and khrymJphimdiit 'typewriter' (with the classifier khryaiJ) agree only partially in classifier assignment. It seems clear that, strictly speaking, classifier categories are generally unconnected to class term categories. In noting the failure of Thai classifier and class term categories to agree, DeLancey (1 986: 44 1 ) remarks, "the categorizations coded by class terms and by classi fiers need not coincide, and neither is entirely coherent; just as there is obviously no principled explanation for which elongated objects do or do not take the lam classifier, so there is no obvious pattern to the sets which do and do not take the lam class term." Unlike classifiers, however, class terms can be used to construct class nouns belonging to any or all taxonomic levels, including su perordinate levels, the basic level, and subordinate levels. Because classifiers are assigned on the basis of the salient characteristics of the real-world referents of basic level nouns, it is therefore to be expected that class term classes mostly do not correspond to classifier classes. But since ordinary subordinate level nouns, whether class nouns or not, regularly take the same classifier as the basic level noun head of the taxonomy to which they belong, any set of subordinate level class
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7 • WOLFPACKS AND BUSINESSWOMEN
•
nouns will normally take the same classifier as that taken by the basic level head ofthe taxonomy. Thai rather freely uses class terms to construct new class nouns, all kinds, taxonomic levels, and degrees of abstraction. Due to the of syntax rules of Thai, a class term will always be the formal head of any simple noun-attributive compound, i.e., of any class noun, what ever the semantic head. Class terms thus build form classes consisting of class nouns that belong to many semantic levels. Yet although the classes they establish may be intriguing, the class terms do not them selves build natural taxonomies. Although a phoronym of some sort is generally obligatory whenever a noun is specified for number, there are exceptions (see above); moreover, not a few class nouns are ab stract or otherwise semantically unusual, and take repeater phoronyms rather than classifiers. Thus, they are often not genuinely classifiable at all. Even when they are classifiable, the attempt to match class term categories with classifier categories essentially amounts to attempting to reconcile form class with semantic class. This is no more likely to be successful in Thai than it is in European gender languages. Therefore, most class noun categories can be treated as non hierarchical formal sets which have semantically significant heads in common-their class terms-but are categorized according to the se mantics of the noun as a whole irrespective of the class term. A set of class nouns can be treated as a collection of tokens of the semantic category set up by the class term, but the class term is not necessarily involved in either classifier categories or Roschian taxonomi.es.
7.4 Concord in Thai Pseudopartitive Constructions Nevertheless, Thai does have remarkable examples of agreement between classifiers and class terms. In some instances the class term of a class noun and the classifier which agrees with the class noun are identical. This produces formal 1concordial agreement, as shown in examples ( l ) and (2). This could alternatively be interpreted as a 'partial repeater' (q.v. Chapter Four), but it would seem better to view partial repeaters as concord markers in the making, as shown below. (I)
khryal)yon nyl) khryal) one UCL[EQIII,MENl) motor 'one motor'
• CLASS TERMS A N D G E N D E R (2)
•
147
khryal)phimdiid nyl) khryal) one UCL[EQUIPMEm) typewriter 'one typewriter'
The examples in ( 1 ) and (2) are basic level nouns. Because their subordinate level nouns will all take the same classifier, and khrym; is highly productive both as a class term and as a classifier, this consti tutes a large, regular, predictable concordial class. Since many other classifiers can serve as class terms, though not by any means all of them (DeLancey 1 986: 438-440), gender-like concordia} agreement of this type is fairly common in Thai.5 However, DeLancey also remarks of class terms and classifiers in Thai that semantically the two types "overlap to a considerable degree" and that they "are clearly distinct only as syntactic categories" (DeLancey 1986: 441 -442). He thus considers Thai class nouns to straddle the line between grammaticized and non-grammaticized (or lexical) noun categorization.6
7.4.1 Class Noun Head Types in Thai Most class nouns in Thai have this morphological structure: ([C LASS TERM) - [QUALIFIER TERM)) Figure 16. Thai class noun structure
Synchronically (and ignoring diachronic etymology), class terms can be nouns or classifiers (DeLancey 1986), among other categories. (Thai also has what seem to be class verbs, a subject clearly in need of serious investigation.) This has a significant effect on agreement. 7.4. 1 . 1 Taxonomic class nouns As discussed in Chapter Five, classifiers for taxonomically subordinate-level nouns are the same as those for the basic level taxonomic head of those same nouns. Consider the examples of the
5.
Aikhenvald (2000: 213-214) discusses data on this from Bisang (1999, 1993) and Hundius and Ktslver (1983), but does not mention the occurrence of concordia) agreement. DeLancey (1986: 440) notes in passing that the classifiers of some class nouns are identical to their class terms, but does not pursue the implications <>f this fact.
6.
Placzek's (1978) study of Thai compounding focuses on a syntactic model of compound formation.
148
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•
class term IJUU 'snake' in the class nouns in (3) through (5), all of which take the classifier for animals, tua, in Thai.7 (3)
tjuu-khiaw nyl) tua snake-green one UCL[ANIMAL) 'one greensnake'
(4)
tjuu-lyam nyt} tua snake-python one UCL[ANlMAL) 'one python'
(5)
tjuu-hizw nyl) tua snake-barking one UCLI...,.•�•AL) 'one cobra'
Since 1JUU 'snake' is the internal lexical head of the class nouns in (3) through (5), they clearly form a classic taxonomic. This type of class term may be called a TAXONOMIC CLASS TERM, and such compound nouns TAXONOMIC CLASS NOUNS (Iguchi 1994). 7.4.1 .2 Gender class nouns Some class nouns in Thai, including several mentioned by DeLancey ( 1986: 438-442), clearly differ from these taxonomic class nouns in their semantic structure. Consider examples (6) through (8}, which have the class term dual), the classifier for round, shining things. (6)
duatj-can nyl) duatj round.shining-moon one UCL[.OUNo, smmNG) 'one moon'
(7)
dual)-taa nyt} duatj round.shining-eye one UCL[aouwo, s1nN1No) 'one eye'
(8)
duaiJ-faj nyt} dual) round.shining-light one UCL[•ouNo,smNlNoJ 'one light'
7.
In Thai, tua is the classifier for 'animal-shaped' things, including all animals, with one exception, the culturally important, semi-sacred chaay 'elephant', which is classified by the classifier chyak UCL(ELEPIIANTSJ· Etymologically me.aning 'rope', cllyak as a classifier is only used for elephants (Aikhenvald 2000: 349). Compare Old Burmese chaiJ 'elephant', which takes the same classifier as horses, ci, etymologically meaning 'ride', as in chayproiJ toe ci bull.elephant one UCL(IUoJNo ANIMAL) 'one bull elephant' (Maung Wun 1975: 92, 103-104).
• CLASS TERMS A N D G E N D E R
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149
The examples in (6) through (8), and all other class nouns formed with the class term dual), take the classifier dual). Because the lexical head of each of these class nouns is the second term, which is morpholo gically the qualifier term, duar; functions not as a taxonomic term but as a classifying term. Since class terms, unlike classifiers, are fully bound forms, this kind of class term may be called a GENDER CLASS TERM, and this kind of noun a GENDER CLASS NOUN (Iguchi 1994). The qualifier term in such examples functions as the internal lexi cal head of the class noun; it takes classifier agreement both internally with its classifying class term head, dual), and externally in pseudopar titive constructions with the classifier dual). There are thus in a sense really two 'class terms' in such 'double-headed' class nouns: the for mal class term proper (here, dual)) functions as a gender term, while the qualifier term (the lexical head) functions as a taxonomic term. This is shown in Figure 17. CLASS TERM
+-
dual) gender tenn morphological head Figure
QUALIFIER TERM
can
taxonomic term semantic head
17. Double-headed class noun structure in Thai
The salient physical characteristics of the real-world referent of a noun determines classifier assignment, so although the lexical or semantic head of the class noun in each of the examples in (6) through (8) is the qualifier term, it actually determines classifier assignment. Taxonomi cally, the qualifier terms in these examples are all basic level nouns and might be expected to produce considerable variation in classifier assignment, but that does not happen with these particular nouns because they lhave already been classed together by their common formal or morphological head, the gender class term dual), which is identical to the classifier dual). which classifies each class noun. Thus, rather than variation there is instead full gender concord between the class noun and its classifier in pseudopartitive constructions. 7 4 2 Other Class Noun Types in Thai .
.
As the first term in a noun compound, the prefix phra- can occur with honorific noun heads. Honorific nouns for humans normally take the honorific classifier for humans, Pol). Consider (9) through (12).
150 (9)
7 • WOLFPACKS A N D BUSINESSWOMEN
•
o iJ phra-coaw njiJ ? phra-god one UC4aoov(no�oRJnc)} 'one god'
njiJ duatl ( 1 0) phra-can phra-moon one UC4RouNo. s•nNJNcl 'one moon' ( 1 1 ) phra-?aathit njiJ dual) one UCLIRouNo. sniNINcl phra-sun 'one sun' ( 12) phra-raatchciwaiJ njiJ IiiI) phra-royal.pa1ace one UC4oUILDINcJ 'one royal palace'
In (12), phrimiatchawal} 'royal palace' can alternatively take the honorific classifier ?o1J to emphasize the fact that the building belongs to the royal family.9 Despite the formal class term-like head position ofphra, it is a prefix10 and in each example the classifier assignment is based not on the first term, phra, but on the second term. As in examples (6) through (8), the apparent morphological head is not the lexical head, though not for the same reason. The prefix phra- also occurs as an unbound noun, phra, in which case it is usually short for phrasi51J 'Buddhist monk' and takes ruup, the classifier for monks, though it can also take the honorific classifier ?o1J. The class nouns in ( 1 3 ) through (15) share the class term maj 'wood, stick', while those in ( 16) through ( 1 8), share the same mor pheme, rna} 'wood, stick ' ' but as their qualifier term. (13)
maj-da:»c
wood-flower one UCL[PLAms. rR.EEs) 'one flowering plant (a plant known to bear flowers)'
8.
Cf. example (6). The honorific nouns with phra- may be ordinary words whose class tenn has been replaced by phra- (Krisadawan Hongladarom p.c., 2005). (Nouns with phra- can be either honorific or non-honorific. Although their status is marked purely lexically, words with phra- are often either honorific themselves or are semantically connected to words which are honorific.)
9.
However, although phraroatchaway is an honorific noun, it usually does not take the honorific classifier. An alternate classifier for ?ol) is phra?oy, used to show very great respect; it can also be used alone as a pronoun or tenn of address.
10. In origin it is a loan from Khmer (Krisadawan Hongiadarom, p.c., 2005).
•
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151
( 14) maj-khiit nylj ktian wood-match one UCL[sncK-uK£) 'one match' (15) maj-khiit nyl) klak wood-match one MCLrsoxJ one box of matches' '
{16) d:J�-maj flower-wood one UCL[rLowER) 'one flower '
( 17) baj-maj nyiJ baj leaf-wood one UCL[lEAr] 'one lear ( 18) tol)-maj nyiJ loiJ trunk-wood one UC4PLANTS. TREES] ' one tree'
The class nouns in examples (13) through (15), which are lexically right-headed, are taxonomic class nouns like examples (6) through (12), even though their class term, maj, is not a prefix but the lexical or morphological or head. Examples ( 16) through ( 18) are regular structurally, in that the lexical head is the first constituent, but in each instance it is also identical to the classifier assigned to the class noun as a whole. Therefore, these are gender class nouns. But they are clearly different from the examples with dum; in (6) through (8) because from a taxonomic viewpoint, maj 'wood', the qualifier term (second constituent), represents a higher taxonomic level than the first term. Nevertheless, since it is not the lexical head it does not deter mine classifier agreement. In these examples maj is thus a taxonomic qualifier term and tells where the first term belongs in the taxonomic hierarchy. There are thus at least two kinds of gender class nouns and two kinds of taxonomic class nouns in Thai.
7.5 Classifier Assignment with Class Nouns in Thai Unlike the above relatively transparent cases, sometimes the class noun has been lexicalized at the word level and analyzing its compo nents does not help explain its classifier, as shown in examples (19) and (20).
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nyl) chin ( 19) khryal)-dontrii equipment-music one UCL[roRrABLE) 'one (musical) instrument' (20)
khryal)-bin instrument-flying 'one
airplane
nyl) one
lam UCL[cvLINDRicAL]
'
The example in ( 19) appears to be a taxonomic class noun in which the first term is the taxonomic and morphological head and the classifier agrees with the noun referent, which the speaker must know is classified by chin, a classifier for some portable things, not by khryar; or another classifier. The example in (20), khryar;bin 'air plane', is even more opaque. It is identifiable as a class noun morpho logically, but it is not lexically analyzable with respect to its classifier assignment, which is apparently due to analogous extension from the classifier assignment of the older word ryabin 'airplane', which means, literally, 'flying boat'. The word rya 'boat' and words with rya as class term head, including tyabin, regularly take Jam as classifier. Other words for airplane have subsequently been assigned the same classifier, lam, as have words such as 'spaceship' and so on. Unless one knows this connection, however, the reason for the assignment of the classifier lam to khryar;bin is mysterious. Classifier agreement in ( 19) and (20) is thus not with the nouns or class terms themselves but with selected salient characteristics of the real-world referent of the nouns (Placzek 1978: 8), whether or not the agreement is mappable onto the lexical heads of the class nouns. In short, classifier assign ment and classifier categories are basically independent of linguistic form in these particular cases.•• In Thai class nouns, then, although the semantic categories of folk taxonomy, a largely ungrammaticized system of noun categorization, do not extend into or overlap with the categories of grammaticized or semi-grammaticized noun categorization systems, the two types of categorization are tied together both by morphology and by the fact that each categorizes the other. 12
I I. On diachronic theories of classifier development, see below. 12. The interesting data presented by Bisang (1999, 1993) should with atlention to the present analysis.
be
reexamined
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The Thai evidence thus suggests that grammaticized systems of noun categorization are motivated in part by specific features of the particular nominal systems in which the noun categorization appears, supporting the theory of Grinevald (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Grin evald 2000; Craig 1994). Although the number of semantic categories within a given noun categorization system is constrained to some ex tent by pragmatic considerations, there is no formal restriction on the kinds of semantic categories that may be found in a given language as a whole. Thus there is, for example, no formal constraint on the devel opment of animacy- or gender-type noun categorization in a language which has mostly classifier-type noun categorization. However, the different types tend to occur in different areas of the language, as in Thai and in English, where natural gender occurs in the pronominal system rather than in the classifier system. Therefore, while Dixon's model ( 1 982, 1986) proposes a one-to-one correspondence between holistic language types and types of grammaticized noun categoriza tion, 13 it would appear that there is a close connection between gram matical function or category on the one hand and type of grammati cized noun categorization system on the other, but completely inde pendent ofputative holistic language type (q.v. Appendix D).
7.6 Obligatory Gender Concord in Thai Among the numerous remarkable features of Thai class nouns is the fact that many of them agree with their classifiers not only seman tically but also morphologically. This results in the presence of a considerable amount of fonnal concord in Thai pseudopartitive constructions. Although the concord in the examples above could perhaps be viewed as incidental, concord in Thai also occurs fully grammaticized, as regular, obligatory, overt agreement. Bisang ( 1999: 152) perceptively notes that morphological concord occurs with multiple qualifiers in Thai NPs where the head noun is governed by a classifier, as in his sentence given in (21 ). (21) rom .khan sii khfaw khan yay khan nii umbrella UCL[nANDLE) color green UCL[nANDLE) big UCL[nAIIDLE) this 'this big green umbrella'
13. Cf. Chierchia ( 1998) for a similar proposal from a more formal viewpoint.
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While the example in (21) is technically grammatical, it is considered odd by Thai informants, as is the similar example in (22). (22) ?biian liil; sii khiiw !iii) yai /iii) nii house UCL[ouiLDiscJ color white UCL[ou•Lo•scJJ big UCL[nu•Lo•scJ this 'this big white house'
The classifier is not normally repeated when the noun has only two qualifiers (in general), as in (24), an expansion of the simple, classic pseudopartitive in (23), though it can be repeated to emphasize the relationship of the adjective to the noun, as in (25) and (26). But when two or more adjectives qualify the same noun, it is obligatory to repeat the classifier with each adjective after the first, as in (27); compare (28), which is ill-formed because it does not have classifier concord. (23) biian /iii) nii house UCL[ouiLDINcJ this 'this house' nii (24) biian yai !iii) house big UCL[au•L�>��L�>�scJ this 'this big white house'
Example (27) thus has obligatory, overt concord. The same rule can be applied to the sentence in example (21) to produce an acceptable sentence, as in (29). Omitting one of the classifiers, as in (30), is unacceptable. (29) r6m sii khlaw khan yay khan nii umbrella color green UCL["""oLE) big UCL'"""ouJ this 'this big green umbrella'
•
(30) *rom
sii
CLASS TERMS AND G E N D E R khiaw yay khan
umbrella color green big 'this big green umbrella'
UCL[uANouJ
•
155
nii
this
The existence of this obligatory agreement in Thai is directly relevant to the theories of diachronic d·evelopment of classifiers that have cen tered on Thai and Chinese.
7.7 Diachronic Theories Grinevald (Craig 1994: 569) claims that an "established contact phenomenon involving classifiers is the spread of numeral classifier systems in Asia from Thai to Chinese" (cf. Erbaugh 198 6 : 401 ). Although this idea is based on DeLancey's (1986) study, it is actually disproved by DeLancey's data, which show that virtually all the recon structible Proto-Tai classifiers are in fact loans from Chinese, and of his three remaining Proto-Tai examples two at least could also be Chinese loans, as suggested by DeLancey himself (1986: 447), leaving only one, 7an, the 'default' classifier for inanirnates. It is thus quite likely that the entire system was borrowed from Chinese, as DeLancey ( 1986: 451 n. 7) also suggests as a possibility. Classifiers are attested in Early Old Chinese (Takashima 2000; Erbaugh 1986), the texts of which go back some two millennia before the earliest texts in any Tai language, so this particular theory seems not to be supportable, as shown in the detailed examination of it by Campbell (2000). It has also been said that class terms are a source for new classifi ers (DeLancey 1 986: 440), partly because it is accepted that classifiers are mostly nominal in origin etymologically (Bisang 1999: 1 66-1 74) too argues that classifiers have developed out of class terms. Grinevald (2000: 60) specifically claims, "Classifiers originated as class terms in the Tai family of languages." This is the only language cited by her in support of this theory. However, the opposite direction of historical development, from classifiers to gender markers, is fairly well attested (Senft 2000a; Aik henvald 2000: 353; Corbett 1991: 5, 136 et seq.). The fact that men sural phoronyms, at least, are a linguistic universal, and the fact that classifiers are phoronyms, would seem to supply the answer to the question about the origin of classifiers-that is, they are latent in all
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languages. At any rate, the above diachronic theory of the develop ment of classifiers in Thai is not supportable by data or typology.'4 Perhaps more importantly, the development of overt concord in modem Thai strongly suggests that the diachronic direction of devel opment of classifier agreement in the language today is not from class terms (a gender-like but only semi-gramrnaticized system) to classifi ers, but, by means of extensive classifier agreement, toward fully con cordial gender.
14.
There is also an old theory, still cited (Aikhenvald 2000: 361 ), that claims Chinese classifiers developed from repeaters. This is not supported by the evi dence. Although it is true that humans are sometimes counted in the Old Chinese texts with A (NMan n!n), the same character as A 'man, human', there is a special classifier for horses and chariots, while by far the most frequent usage for both humans and things in general is simply numeral plus noun (Campbell 2000) -i.e., without any classifier or other phoronym. The latter fact very strongly suggests that Proto-Chinese did not have classifiers. The language apparently began acquiring or developing them in the Early Old Chinese period.
• 8 • A
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Phoronyms and Cognition This chapter summarizes the findings and attempts to answer the classifier version of the ancient question about the significance of gender. The popular idea that classifier classes reflect basic cognition agrees with data from experimental neuroscience. But the idea that iconic implied classifier cate gories are essentially non-linguistic percolations upward of cognition found in animal brains in general is also supported because languages typically only recognize two or three basic categories grammatically. This supports the view that language per se does not exist in non-human cognition.
T
he grammatical category of PHORONYM defmed One and Two includes several subcategories:
m
Chapters
Table 13. Phoronym subtypes1
l . repeaters: exact copy of noun; [...ADJECTIVE INSERTION] different from noun; used with nouns referring to units; [+CLASS); (-ADJECTIVE INSERTION), a. taxonomic
2. sortal unit classifiers: wholly or partly
b. confi gurational
c. heterogeneous 3. sortal group classifiers: wholly different from noun; used with nouns referring
to groups; (+CLASS]; (±ADJECTIVE INSERTION] 4. mensural classifiers: wholly or partly different from noun; [±CLASS]
a. containers and discrete solids; [+ADJECTIVE INSERTION] b. others; [-ADJECTIVE INSERTION) 5. hyperphoronyms: wholly different from noun; [-cOUNT/MASS}
The SORTAL CLASSIFIER is distinguished from most MENSURAL CLAS SIFIERS (or 'measures'), REPEATERS, HYPERPHORONYMS, and other
I.
See Appendix A on QUASIPHORONYMS, which are are related but not true phoronyms, and AUTOMEASURES, which are not phoronyms at all.
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phoronyms, by having the feature of obligatory covert agreement with the target noun of pseudopartitive constructions in which the classifier occurs. Analysis of granunatical agreement reveals that although classifiers often mark large, overarching categories that seem to have complex internal structure, they do not actually agree on the basis of such categories but on the basis of highly restricted, low-level taxonomies. which together constitute the implied classifier categories. (See Chapter Five.) Moreover, the few fully grammaticized, minimally obligatory or default classifiers of each system tend to follow the same basic semantic pattern of semantic noun classification agreement seen operating within the gender systems of concordia! gender languages. The two primary functions of the true classifier morpheme are its semantic function, which indicates CLASS, and its morphosyntactic function of specifying a noun for NUMBER. Semantically, both unit classifiers and group classifiers usually refer to categories wider than any individual noun with which an individual classifier agrees. Mor phosyntactically, the unit classifier specifies an individual referent (or, with a numeral greater than 'one', the referents represented by the noun) for number, while the group classifier specifies a particular col lection of individual units of the noun referent. In any case, classifiers
and all other phoronyms refer not to parts ofanything but to the whole referent, unlike the N1 nouns in partitive constructions. The expres sions a cup of tea or a piece offurniture do not refer to a portion of anything but to the whole thing-the total amount of tea that is in the cup, the entire chair or table, and so on. The construction in which classifiers and other phoronyms occur, the pseudopartitive, follows a fairly rigid pattern cross-linguistically, and is characterized by a number of strict syntactic constraints. As is to be expected, different kinds of surface grammatical features charac terize its actual form in each language, and the phoronym may range from a subset of free common nouns involving specific morphological case marking (as in English and Finnish) to a completely bound mor pheme without other morphological marking (as in Mandarin and Japanese). The grammatical relationship between the phoronym and the target noun is the same in all languages examined in this book, and seems also to be the same in other languages that have been said to have classifiers, whatever their morphological status. This regularity appears to be based on the phoronym category's inclusion of meas ures. It is thus a linguistic universal that may be iconic in origin.
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Careful analysis of the distribution and occurrence of classifiers shows that phoronyms in general rarely occur in oral corpora, classifi ers occur still more rarely, and true classifiers constitute a tiny per centage of all classifier phoronym usages, as discussed in Chapter Four. This means that they seldom occur even in the oral corpora of classifier languages. Since most nouns are also uncategorized in Euro pean gender languages (despite the popular misconception that the obligatory gender markers actually categorize the nouns), it appears that true noun classification per se is something which occurs rarely in natural texts. It is thus not surprising that when it does appear it is very highly marked, and salient. The reverse is also true: noun classifica tion tends to occur in highly marked parts of the grammar. This con nection should be investigated further. The distribution and occurrence of actual noun classification seem to be very similar cross-linguistically. True unit and group clas sifiers, though they are found in rather small numbers in some lan guages, are ubiquitous, regardless of language 'type'. This has called into question the typological dichotomy between 'classifier languages' and 'gender languages'. The modem version of this typology appears to derive mainly from Greenberg (1972), Allan (1977), and Dixon ( 1982, 1986), whose interpretations are still dominant with respect to the identificatiion of classifiers outside the 'already identified' group (i.e., 'those included in the present classification') and the 'extremely exotic endangered language' group (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Aik henvald 2000). Thus Allan ( 1977: 286) says, "English possesses nouns which correspond to Thai lexemes which everyone agrees are classifiers." Similarly, Greenberg (1972: 282-283) treats his sole English example "head of cattle" as sufficient to argue that English is a 'classifier lan guage', though he rejects the idea in favor of the received view of "writers of grammars." Allan (1977: 286) argues likewise that "some languages are more properly called 'classifier languages' than oth ers. . . Thai is a classifier language, but English is not." Yet he notes, correctly, "It is not necessarily the case that .all nouns are classified; Burmese and Vietnamese have large numbers of nouns which do not occur with a classifier. In Khmer, classifiers are used in formal but not colloquial speech" (Allan 1977: 286 n.2). In view of this point, there fore, and of the evidence presented in this book, it is hardly correct to
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say that Burmese, Khmer, and Vietnamese are classifier languages but English, Finnish, and Russian are not. Nevertheless, despite the undoubted existence of some sortal unit classifiers in English and other European languages, it will be objected that it is difficult to maintain that they are a fundamental, characteris tic feature of these languages, compared to the evidence on putative systemically obligatory sortal unit classification in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and many other languages of East and Southeast Asia. This is because it is generally believed that noun classification is not only obligatory in these languages, it is different from whatever noun cate gorization occurs in English, Finnish, and so on. However, it has been shown above that the evidence presented by scholars in favor of this theory is alone sufficient to disprove it. Yet if there are no significant differences between these two groups of languages in the way they categorize nouns, there surely is in the way they typically specify them for number. And indeed, the overriding reason for the perceived difference with respect to the pres ence or absence of classifiers between the two groups is that in Eng lish, Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, and to some extent Uzbek, overt number specification is obligatorily marked on most count nouns in non-phoronym NPs, while number specification via pseudopartitive constructions is obligatory with most mass nouns, with pluralities of count nouns, and with a small number of count nouns. By contrast, in the languages of East and Southeast Asia, and again to some extent Uzbek, nouns in general require a pseudopartitive construction in or der to be specified for number. Even the non-phoronym plural markers that do exist in these languages are mostly restricted to particular ani macy classes. For example, the Mandarin plural suffix -men (q.v. Ap pendix B), and similarly, the Japanese plural suffix -tachi, can only be attached to a small number of nouns for humans. The fact that some languages tend to have a compact set of actually used sortal unit clas sifiers, while others have a compact set of actually used sortal group classifiers, and any other formal morphology involved either rarely occurs or does not actually categorize, suggests that the typological distinction between the two sets with regard to noun classification is not between 'classifier languages' and 'gender languages' (which in any case certainly cannot be called 'non-classifier languages') but be tween 'predominantly unit classifier languages' and 'predominantly group classifier languages'; the respective distribution is predictable
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largely on the basis of the type o f default number marking in a lan guage. Closer inspection of putative classifier languages and putative gender languages suggests that the differences have little to do with the feature of noun classification but rather with number specification and with the presence or absence of overt concordia) morphology. As for number, the significant observed differences among the languages discussed are not actually connected to classifiers per se, but to the type of number specification (which generally only domi nates, with exceptions ranging from zero to overt markers) in any given language. As a consequence, languages could be characterized by whether they are 'phoronym-dominant specifying' languages or not. This would sort out the Asian languages (Chinese, Japan.ese, Thai, etc.) on the one hand and the European languages (English, Russian, Finnish, etc.) on the other. As for concordia! morphology per se, there is an obvious, clear distinction to be made between the European and Asian languages discussed above. But this concordia! morphology has nothing whatever to do with actual noun classification per se. Any ac tual noun classification involved is largely, if not completely, inde pendent of the morphological category in which it is found. This is true even when that category-e.g., gender, or classifiers-has tradi tionally been defined primarily in terms of noun classification, which is the most salient semantic feature of these categories. The languages discussed in this book are representatives of the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Japanese-Koguryoic, Chinese, Tai, and Tibeto-Burman families. With regard to their morphological typology, the languages included may be characterized as predomi nantly agglutinative in structure (Turkish, Uzbek); agglutinative and isolating-compounding (Japanese); isolating-compounding (Mandarin, Thai); agglutinative, isolating-compounding, and fusional (Tibetan); isolating-compounding and fusional (English); fusional (Russian); and fusional and agglutinative (Finnish, Hungarian). This list obviously represents not only a continuum but a circular one. There are no lines between the 'types' mentioned, despite the labels, which are intended only to suggest something about the type of morphology that tends to
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be dominant in prominent grammatical areas of the languages men tioned.2 Within these languages, there is evidently a typological contin uum between languages that have mainly unit classifiers and those that have mainly group classifiers, with most, if not all, attested languages falling somewhere in between the two theoretical extremes. Languages that would seem to fall somewhat in the middle include Russian, with gender and mostly group classifiers but also some unit classifiers; Hungarian and Uzbek, which have similar numbers of both group classifiers and sortal unit classifiers; and Thai, which has both obliga tory unit classifiers and an obligatory 'gender' concord system. A few languages have been thought to have no grammaticized noun classifi cation whatsoever, but this is not true of at least two putative cases, Finnish (see Chapter Three) and Mongolian (Batmunkh 2004). In fact, there seem to be no examples of such languages. This supports Allan's ( 1 977: 286) remark, "Perhaps all languages have classifiers," and that of Grinevald and Seifart (2004: 244), "nominal classification in the languages ofthe world" is an "omnipresent phenomenon." The categories implied by classifiers and other noun classification phenomena have much in common cross-linguistically, and have been intensively studied. As argued by many scholars from the beginnings of modem classifier studies on, these categories seem to reveal some thing about the way cognition works-in other words, something that ubiquitously percolates up into language but is fundamentally prelin guistic or sublinguistic in nature. This view is supported by first language acquisition studies and by neuroscience research on perception. Studies of child language ac quisition have shown that although small children can perceptually distinguish between taxonomically basic level objects (e.g., cars and trucks), they do not categorize linguistically at the basic level but at slightly more 'global'-immediately superordinate-taxonomic cate gories, similar to those found in classifier systems, as shown in Chap ter Five (cf. Aikhenvald 2000: 338; Clark 1977). For example, infant speakers of American English often use dog for all animals, including,
2.
The idea of holistic morphological typology (q.v. Appendix D) seems to be a by product of our categorizing brains. I have arbitrarily begun this list with aggluti native examples. There is of course no perfect type language. The 'isolating language' is an especially problematic idea from every angle (Beckwith 2006a).
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among others, horses and rabbits. However, small children do clearly distinguish between things such as birds and airplanes, which belong to different taxonomies, despite the similarity not only of their shape and function but of the size of the exemplars that were presented to them and the materials used to make them (soft toys designed to be held by small children). "Birds and airplanes were treated as different even though the exemplars from both categories had similar shapes, including outstretched wings, and were of the same texture" (Mandler and McDonough 1993: 291; cf. Gelman and Coley 1 990). Children later acquire both specific basic level terms (as well as subordinate level terms) and superordinate level terms, and replace their basic level labels for superordinate categories-such as dog-with the adult-speech superordinate word, in this case animal. However, the primary taxonomic categorizations already made as small children are related to those made by adult speakers. Research on Japanese children's acquisition of classifiers accords with the above findings. "It seems that in the acquisition of Japanese numeral classifiers, children also start conceptualizing classifiers at a broader and higher level in a hierarchical structure then proceed down to more specific subclasses" (Yamamoto and Keil 1 996: 859). This relationship can be seen in the taxonomic constraint on anaphora, which shows that functional classifier categorization is restricted to distinct 'taxonomic prototype' categories headed by immediate su perordinates. As shown in Chapter Five, classifier categories are actu ally form classes, within which there are taxonomic subclasses, the only ones that show up at the functional grammatical level. Natural gender and other types of linguistic categorization-which are always at least partly a categorization of the real world-similarly are cen tered on these 'taxonomic prototypes' . While the way children acquire classifiers (Aikhenvald 2000: 4 1 7-42 1 ) supports the non-grarnmaticized nature of most adult classi fier categories, paradoxically it also supports the results of cross linguistic research on the categories marked by classifiers, i.e., ex tended in one, two, or three dimensions, inanimate, animal, human, etc. (Aikhenvald 2000: 286-293; Allan 1977). The results of child language acquisition studies are supported by research in the field of neuroscience, where it has long been known from laboratory experiments that the image received by the eyes o� an animal is sent to the visual cortex by electrical signals and is sent on
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"to various brain sites outside the visual cortex, the amygdala, and the striatum of the basal ganglia" (Tanaka 1996: 1 1 0). Primates recognize objects mainly by their visual images, but significantly for classifier studies, their visual perception focuses on physically prominent fea tures of percepts. Tanaka (1996: 109, 135) concludes: This recognition is not a template matching between the input image and stored images but a flexibl.e process in which considerable change in images-due to different illumination, viewing angle, and articulation of the object-can be tolerated. In addition, our visual system can deal with images of novel objects, based on previous visual experience of similar objects. Generalization may be an intrinsic property of the primate visual system . . .The accumulated findings favor the idea that no cognition units represent the concept of objects; instead the conc.ept of objects is found only in the activities distributed over various regions of the brain.
Simply put, the brain stores images of the perceived objects in differ ent pieces, based on salient features of the objects.3 Implied classifier categories are organized precisely in this way. They are not fixed genetically in the brain, nor even acquired and es tablished through nurture. Classifiers and other phoronyms may be viewed as snapshots of noun referents. Cognitive neuroscientists have identified the process of recording and storing these 'snapshots'-or salient features of them-in the brain (Tanaka 1996). The semantics of classifier phoronyms is essentially the study of these snapshots. While classifiers perform the same grammatical function as the other phoronyms (because they are all phoronyms), classifiers also imply structured categories. With clearer definition of the classifier as a subtype of phoronym that has the feature [+cLASS], the idea of the 'classifier language' makes a little more sense: it is simply a language that has an extensive system of [+CLASS] phoronyms, or classifiers, within its phoronym system. On the other hand, neuroscientists have also argued persuasively that a human or an animal's instantaneous, spontaneous, involuntary reaction upon perception is founded on 'emotional' cognition located in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, where instinctual emotional responses-fight or flight, eat or don't eat, mate or don't mate, etc.-are preprogrammed for us geneti cally to ensure our survivaL This kind of 'primary cognition' is both
3.
Atsushi lriki (p.c., 2005).
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chemical and electrical, and constitutes a fundamental logic insepara ble from the functions of our bodies (Damasio 1994).4 As Lieberman (2002: 2, 158) .says, human "cognitive ability can be traced back to the learned motor responses of molluscs." In this view there is no signifi cant difference in basic emotions, i.e., basic thought, between humans and other animals rather far down the evolutionary scale. According to the above-cited research, animals think 'like' hu mans and, correspondingly, humans basically think 'like' other ani mals-i.e., according to the processes of perception and motor re sponses. Many of the categories involved in primary cognition-the fundamental categories of the human mind, both unconstructed ones corresponding to salient physical features and, apparently, already constructed ones-appear to be something like classifier categories as they have been described in the recent functional typology literature. These categories are based on the physical configuration and other attributes of the central member of prototypical categories or the head oftaxonornic categories, and on the manner of the perceiver's custom ary interaction with members of that category. It is important to note, however, that classifiers do not refer directly to these discrete salient features of a percept, they refer indirectly to the whole percept, just as the brain stores pieces of perception as identifiers of whole percepts. The semantics of a particular classifier are the sum of the salient fea tures of percepts marked by that classifier; these are the elements comparable to-and evidently related to-the brain's processing of visual perception. As shown in Chapter Five, language does not rec ognize these overarching categories as such. Nevertheless, our brains seem to be structured in such a way that we cannot think without categorizing, and it is not surprising that peo ple overcategorize and miscategorize, sometimes deliberately and rna-
4.
A vivid example of this is related by Thomas (1 994: 9-10). A wildlife rehabilitator had raised a puma (mountain lion) fro m birth as a house-pet and took the cat to a museum one day for a lecture about pumas. While the cat was being led through the building to the lecture hall, they passed an exhibit of animal dioramas in glass cases, one of which contained a stuffed deer. Instantly she leapt to the attack, though she only crashed into the glass and feJJ to the floor. Significantly, the deer was long dead, and behind glass; it thus did not move and had no scent. Moreover, the puma apparently had never seen a deer up close, if at all. Even housecats will stalk fuJJ-sized deer and pounce on them. This is apparently an example of a geneticaJJy transmitted template.
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liciously, though they are rarely aware of the primitiveness of this kind of thought process, with its origins in the "subcortical basal ganglia" (Tomasello 2004: 325) of our "reptilian brain" (Lieberman 2002). The close correlation of the results of neuroscience research with cross-linguistic typological studies of implied classifier categories supports the theory that the categories are based on sublinguistic cog nition. The analysis in this book shows that these same categories are not recognized
as categories
at the grammatical, or purely linguistic
level-that is, their categorization is, again, sublinguistic. This corre lation would seem to have important implications for linguistic and neuroscientific theories of the cognitive basis of language. It is a truism that the grammar of every language is different, and that so far no one has been able to discover an underlying Universal Grammar lurking somewhere in the human brain. All distinctive hu man societies have distinctive languages or dialects, and all normal humans, no matter what their social origins, are capable of learning the same language perfectly if they start out early enough in life in the same environment. But, although both functional typologists and for mal typologists have discovered many specific linguistic universals and universal tendencies in grammar, so that the principles underlying the attested forms do seem to have a common origin, purely linguistic attempts to discover Universal Grammar, the 'holy grail' of theoretical linguistics, have so far failed. Linguists who have set off on this quest have therefore turned increasingly to cognitive science, especially to brain science, in hope of finding the answer. Yet there is one type of 'language' which always has the same ba sic grammar, no matter what its historical origin, namely 'true' pidg ins' (Haiman 1994: 1636). True pidgins have iconic grammar, which means that their syntax is based on the mirroring of real-world event
5.
True pidgins are temporary language-substitutes, accomodations made by mono lingual speakers of two or more different languages, not full languages. Those which develop into languages are creoles based on an identifiable language, with all the complexities of full natural languages, including regular syntax rules, mor phology, etc. Though some iconicity surely remains, there is iconicity in every language. Moreover, it has been claimed, rightly, that "all mature languages are creoles" (Haiman
1994:
1636). Some creoles are unfortunately mislabelled
'pidgins', or are simply pidgin-influenced dialects or registers of the dominant language, such as modem Hawaiian 'pidgin' English. They are thus extremely shon-lived and generally do not last long enough to be recorded and studied.
•
PHORONYMS AND C O G N I T I O N
•
167
structure. Because that structure is extra-linguistic by definition-like classifier categories, which are also ultimately based on real-world percepts, whether or not metaphorical extension is involved-it does not matter whether the lexical basis of the language is English, French, or Chinese, the grammar will always be fundamentally the same: "Me Tarzan. Hunt buffalo." In pidgins it is not necessary to specify tense or gender, but it is necessary to count things. That involves sorting and the measure, the most basic type of phoronym, which is evidently found in all languages. The foundations for a classifier system thus exist even in pidgins. However, if Universal Grammar is the iconically founded representation of process and relationship stripped of all lin guistic form per se, as actually expressed in a true pidgin-..Tarzan hunt buffalo"-it is not perhaps purely linguistic grammar but simply cognitive mapping of the world. On the other hand, it is well known that animals taught to communicate 'linguistically' with humans are incapable of learning syntax-the 'word order' varies considerably from 'utterance' to 'utterance'. This demonstrates that syntax per se is linguistic, and animals do not have the ability to communicate even in a pidgin. Since all pidgins have basically the same structure, does this mean that Universal Grammar has already been found?6 Linguists may have something to contribute to the study of this 'universal grammar', but if a true, fully-formed human language may be defined as one which has features specifically not found in true pidgins, studying them may not reveal much about human language. Linguists must develop a principled theory of language that accounts for linguistic similarities and differences among the thousands of lan guages in the world. But a purely linguistic theory should not be based on non-linguistic data-while language is built on top of pre-linguistic or sub-linguistic cognition, which we share, at least in part, with our evolutionary cousins, language per se is fundamentally different and fundamentally human. That means linguistics is, again, the study of this uniquely human manifestation of specifically human recursive cognition and human communication. It would seem to be a big enough, important enough topic to spend some time on.
6.
Discussion of pidgins typically does not cover this marginally linguistic type, so the present discussion is speculative in this respect. The process of development of a true pidgin can and should be tested in laboratory conditions.
• A P P E N D I X
A •
Phoronym Pretenders
T
here are two forms that are superficially similar to phoronyms and have been confused with them (especially in the functional typology literature on classifiers). They are both interesting and important in themselves, and deserve special treatment, but neither of them is a phoronym according to the defmition established in this book. This Appendix is only a brief introduction to them.
Aut:omeasures Automeasures constitute a distinct category in Mandarin and other 'classifier languages'. They generally refer to an inherent quantity, whether temporal (e.g., thin 'day', nian 'year') or spatial (cm i 'inch', gongchi 'meter'), or they are semantically numerical (e.g., shuang 'pair', bcm 'half). It is believed that in classifier languages such words either cannot take phoronyms (classifiers, repeaters, etc.) or they constitute their own phoronyms (Silverstein 1986: 5 1 1 ; Burling 1961: 56).1 However, this analysis is not quite correct. In Mandarin, a fair number of these forms occur-obligatorily with numerals or determiners, but never in a full tripartite pseudoparti tive construction. They are treated as 'measures' rather than nouns by Chao (1968: 595-598),2 and quite rightly in this case, since they em-
I.
Burling uses the term "measures" for the category called 'automeasures' here, but he also considers them to be "numeral classifiers" (Burling 1961 : 56). Unfor tunately, many studies of classifiers ignore automeasures.
2.
He mixes them together with what he calls "group measures," but notes some can take the genitive-attributive suffix -de while others cannot (Chao 1968).
170
• APPENDIX A •
body an actual measurement, unlike most mensural classifiers. Despite the fact that their English equivalents are common nouns in most in stances, in Mandarin most of them are not ordinary nouns. For exam ple, titin 'day' in ( 1 ) and nian 'year' in (2) are countable. (I)
san tian 3 day 'three days'
(2)
san nian 3 year 'three years'
However, as shown in (3) and (4), they cannot occur in a full pseudo partitive construction, as all true Mandarin phoronyms and nouns can. (3)
•san titin shijian 3 day time 'three days of time'
(4)
•san nim i shengming 3 year life *'three years of life'
The old scholarly disagreement on the identity of such words focuses on whether they are classifiers or nouns (Allan 1977: 306-307). However, the disagreement is based on the fact that they occur alone after a numeral or detenniner, never in a three-morpheme pseudo partitive construction. Although Allan (I 977: 307) concludes that they are "noun-free" classifier constructions, this is difficult to justify insofar as the raison d'etre of classifiers per se is supposedly to cate gorize nouns, or at least to grammatically specify expressed or implied noun targets. It would thus seem that at least in Mandarin and other languages with extensive classifier systems, such words are neither nouns nor phoronyms but an entirely distinct grammatical category. This appears to be confirmed by the fact that these fonns can often take an adjective complement, unlike phoronyms in full pseudopartitive constructions, or even in reduced anaphoric constructions. Consider (5) through (10). (5)
threefeel
(6)
san chi three foot 'three feet'
• P H ORONYM P R E TE N D E R S • (7)
threefeet long
(8)
san chf chang three foot long 'three feet long'
(9)
*three pieces (offurniture) big/new
( I 0) *san ben
three
UCL[oovNDvoLUME]
171
(shu) chimgllao (book) long/old
Forms ofthis type are called AUTOMEASURES in this book. In some cases, automeasures are homophonous with nouns, but the differences are striking.3 The measure titin in example (1) is also a noun meaning 'sky, heaven', as in ( 1 1 ). In the latter sense it would not be countable without a phoronym. However, due to its semantics it proved impossible for informants to imagine a situation in which it would be counted. In the case of chi 'foot (measure of length)', this is not problematic. Its homonymous noun is chi 'ruler' which can be, and is, regularly counted with the classifier phoronym -ge, as in ( 12). ( I I ) tian hen liang sky very bright 'The sky is bright.' (I2) gei wo nei-ge chi gi ve I sa that-UCL[-CLAss) ruler 'Give
me that ruler.'
Automeasures thus clearly cannot take classifiers because they are already lexically specified-essentially uniting phoronym and noun in one morpheme. Allan (1977: 306-307) notes their "adverbial function" and suggests "they are in construction with verbs, or else with the propositions in which the verbs are predicates, and not with nouns at all." This would seem to account for their occurrence with adjectives but not with nouns. Automeasures are potentially extremely interesting. Further study could significantly revise this very sketchy preliminary discussion.
3.
Compare the differences between classifiers and ihomonymous nouns, such · as head in English and tou 'head' in Mandarin, mentioned in Chapter One.
172
•
APPENDIX A •
Quasiphoronyms Mandarin PHORONYMS, of whatever subtype, are bound forms that cannot occur without a preceding numeral or determiner. They are said , to be "lexico-grammatical . (Grinevald and Seifart 2004: 261), semi lexical (Stavrou 2003), or semi-granun aticized (Grinevald 2000: 61).4
ben UCL(voLuME)• the SORTAL CLASSIFIER for things configured as bound volumes, such as books and magazines, is
For example, Mandarin
a bound form, unlike its etymologically related free noun form
benzi
'book, volume'. Similarly, the MENSURAL CLASSIFIER bei MCL(cuPJ is a bound form, unlike its related free noun form beizi 'cup' .s Of Mandarin classifiers in actual daily use, only tou UCL1 ooMESTic ANIMALS) is also a common noun, tou 'head'.6 It is said to be possible to create new classifiers with common
nouns, and the usual examples are given, as in (13) through (15) (Li and Thompson 1981: 111; Chao 1968; Erbaugh 1986: 417).
(13) yi
di
shul - yi
di-de
shul
one floor water - one floor-GEN water 'a floor [-ful of] water', or 'water all over the floor'
(J4) yi WUZI
zei
- yi WUZi-de
zt}i
one house/room thief - one house/room-GEN thief 'a houseful/roomful of thieves'
(15) yi
tou
him
one head sweat 'a headful of sweat' These are called by Chao 'temporary measures' (1968: 603). In accordance with the received view, they could perhaps be called 'ad hoc phoronyms'.7 However, it must be noted that this is not as open-
4.
She refers to the "incomplete grammaticalization" of classifiers and their "remaining of a lexical nature" (Grinevald 2000: 61). While this is problematic for true classifiers, it certainly applies to the QUA.SIPHORONYMS treated here.
5.
For a discussion of Mandarin morphology in general, see Packard (2000); for some theoretical and conceptual problems, see Beckwith (2006a).
6.
However, it has completely different meanings and functions as a classifier and a noun. as noted above and as shown very clearly in example ( 15).
as
7.
Unfortunately, Chao (I 968) docs not give ex ampies for most of his forms. Mandarin wuzi means 'house' in some dialects, •room' in others, and in others it is not used at all-Taipei Mandarin usesfangzi 'house' andfangjian 'room'.
•
PHORONY M PRET EN DERS
•
173
ended a construction as has been claimed. For example, one cannot say *yi qiangbi xue one wall blood, or even yi qiangbi-de xue one wall-GEN blood 'a wallfull of blood' or 'blood all over the wall'. In addition, Chao mixes together ad hoc forms that obligatorily take the genitive suffix -de and those that can optionally take it, along with genuine phoronyms, which do not allow it at all. Due to the restricted semantics and exclusive use of the constructions as QUANTIFIERS, without regard to count or mass, the relevant forms in these constructions may more accurately be called QUASIPHORONYMS. Quasiphoronyms are normally freely usable with both count and mass nouns (limited of course by extra-linguistic considerations) as shown in examples ( 16) through ( 18). This is another feature that sets them apart from classifiers, which are strictly assigned to one or the other, either count or mass nouns.8 The same feature is typical of Eng lish quasiphoronyms that have become idiomatic expressions, such as a lot of, which is used as a quantifier with the meaning 'many, much'. (16) yi witzi(-de)
jiiiotache
one room(-GEN) bicycle 'a roomful of bicycles'
(17) yi witzi(-de) shuT one room(-GEN) water 'a roomful of water' or 'water all over the place (in the room)'
(18) yi tou
chong
one head bug 'a headful ofbugs'
Note that English also freely creates quasiphoronyms from common nouns with the suffix -jul. The above examples show that if a real world container can hold things referred to by mass nouns, or things referred to by count nouns, there is no restriction on what can be put inside. The same principle applies to a surface that may be covered with either count or mass referents. The clear Mandarin distinction between count and mass is thus, uniquely, entirely missing in such examples. In English, because of the obligatory grammatical marking of the count/mass distinction, the target noun in such constructions
8.
Except for the small class of HYPERPHORONYMS, which includes words such as Mandarin zh.Ong 'kind, type' and lei 'kind, type' and their English equivalents. Hyperphoronyms are true phoronyms, unlike quasiphoronyms.
174
•
APPENDIX A •
will nevertheless still carry either the plural number suffix.
-sl-es (for
count nouns) or the zero suffix (for mass nouns). Quasiphoronyms are created from nouns and used metaphorically in Mandarin, exactly as in English. Strictly speaking, they are full, unbound nouns (i.e., forms which can occur freely in any syntactic position that may be taken by nouns) and mostly allow or require use of the genitive-attributive suffix
-de when used in quantifying expres
sions. This feature sharply distinguishes them from true phoronyms (including measures), which are distinguished by the inability to take the genitive -attributive
-de (see also Chapter Two). Semantically, all
of the constructions noted in the literature are of the same type, indi cating a surface or container 'full' of the target noun referent, as in examples (13) through (15). They are not really very easily created, and it is actually not easy to come up with acceptable 'new' ones. Quasiphoronyms are not true phoronyms, though they can some times be substituted for them. They seem to be, simply, idiomatic ex pressions.
• APPENDIX
B •
The Mandarin Plural Suffix
T
he classifier phoronym -ge UCL1.CLAssJ can theoretically be used in a pseudopartitive construction with any noun of whatever animacy or other class status.1 A number specifier of some kind-whether direct or indirect, precise or imprecise-must appear in the slot immediately preceding the classifier, as shown in example (1). However, nouns can in a few cases be specified for plural number via the suffix -men. This option is restricted to nouns referring to humans, as in (2), and it usually has a collective deictic (or vocative) connota tion, perhaps because -men is obligatory with plural personal pronouns (e.g., ta '3sG' : tamen '3PL'). But in any event such forms cannot take numerals when they are so marked, as shown in (3) and (4). (I)
liioshf
stin-ge
three-ucL1_ cLAss] teacher 'three teachers'
(2)
liioshf-men teacher-NUMB[Pl) 'teachers'
(3)
*son liioshf-men three teacher-NUMB[•LJ 'three teachers'
(4)
*stin-ge liioshf-men three-UCL[ CLASS] teacher-NUMB[PL) 'three teachers' -
Both markers can nevertheless occur in a Mandarin NP-i.e., pure plural specification with -men and pure number specification with a
I.
This is, however, not true in practice. See the discussion in Chapter One.
176
• APPE NDI X B •
numeral plus -ge UCL1_ CLASS!> referring to the same noun target-but this is possible only in apposition with a plural personal pronoun, as shown in (5). (5}
td-men sdn-ge
3-PL
liioshi
three-UCL[-AoR) teacher
'those three teachers' (lit., 'they three teachers')
Plural pronouns can also directly modify nouns, as in (6), and the noun can optionally take the plural suffix too, as in (7), both of which are examples of apposition. Though the construction in (7) produces concordia! agreement, it seems to be less common.2 (6}
ni-men liioshi 2-PL
teacher
'you teachers'
(7)
ni-men liioshi-men 2-PL
teacher-PL
'you teachers'
Even without a pronoun such expressions are semantically virtually always deictic, and somewhat vocative. They are used to address or refer to a collective group of individuals, usually from a position of authority (cf. Rijkhoff2002: 1 54). In any case, with nouns the plural suffix is highly marked. It nor mally occurs with a half-dozen or so nouns for humans in standard Mandarin, and otherwise-in practice almost exclusively-with per sonal pronouns, which in Mandarin do not refer to gender or animacy classes, despite the widespread but mistaken idea that the third person pronoun ta "can only be used with human referents" (Aikhenvald 2000: 439). The above-discussed forms of number marking in Mandarin and English nouns may thus be said to occur almost in complementary distribution in the two languages. Mandarin has mainly-in practice almost exclusively-unit [+CLASS] classifiers and one marked plural [+CLASS] suffix (-men) , but English has mainly group (+CLASS] classi fiers and one unmarked plural [-CLASS] suffix (-s).
2.
This is a purely impressionistic guess. If large corpora of genuine oral colloquial Mandarin (i.e., not the extremely artificial language used in the media) become available, the actual frequency of such strings could be determined.
• A PPENDIX
C •
The Pseudopartitive in English Syntax
T
he PSEUDOPARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION ('I') is a type of NP (Noun Phrase). A sentence containing two pseudopartitive constructions, which are marked ''I'' here (but below, ''I'P' for Pseudopartitive Phrase), is presented in Figure 18 in accordance with recent practice in formal syntax (e.g., Radford 1997). IP
� I � �
'I'
I
VP
that flock ofsheep
will
v
\
eat
'I'
I
nwotonsofhay
Figure 18. The English pseudopartltlve a Ia formal syntax
Three English pseudopartitive constructions, those two big bags o f candy. a pack ofwolves, and ten tons ofhay, are diagrammed in detail in Figure 19, following the analysis in Chapter Two, which the present graphic summaries do not replace.
178
• APPENDIX C
•
\liP
I
SIN
S/<1>
N
�
-------
S(D/Q)
�
D
�
Q
Flex
Quan
tho-
-se
two a ten
I
I
Comp
I
big
I
I
candy wolv I -s- 'olof hay - 'o/of -s- 'olof
Phor
��
Det
Flex
Nn
Flex
I
bagpack ton-
-es
Figure 19. English pseudopartitive constructions in detail
Two Mandarin pseudopartitive constructions, nei san-zhi mao that three-UCL1ANIMALJ cat 'those three cats' and yi-bei cha one-MCL(curJ tea
'a cup of tea' are shown in Figure 20. The Q node can be expanded to
accommodate insertion of an adjectival complement to the quantifier with some mensural classifiers, as described in Chapter One (cf. Figure
19 for the English equivalent). \liP
I
SIN
S/<1>
-------
s
I
�
D
nei
I
Q
I
zhi bei
san yi
Figure 20. Mandarin pseudopartitive constructions
N
I
mao cha
•
THE PSE UDOPARTITIVE IN E NGLISH SYNTAX
•
179
As an overview consider the model in Figure 21, which describes a typical English
SVO sentence with pseudopartitive noun phrases (\11).
Each node type (shown in superscript) dominates a specific level of the grammar. This model treats each of the three primary functional positions in the sentence (i.e.,
SVO, not only the subject position) as
the 'specifier' of the following functional position. The intention is to suggest that each
NP and VP node as a whole is dominated by the
preceding node as a whole, rather than by one constituent of it. All primary functional constituents are thus represented as head nodes on the rightmost main branch. The diagram presented in Figure
21 is
stretched out for the sake of greater visual clarity in Figure 22.1
NICK
/\
q�pM
1\
S/F
CPM
NF
Figure 21. The pseudopartitive in English syntax
I.
Additional Abbreviations: F = nodes that can have Flexional agreement i n num ber, gender, person; M = nodes that can move depending on Mood; K = nodes affecting or affected by clause-level Case (i.e., nominative and a.ccusative oblique) that is stntctura/, whether or not overtly marked. (NP-intemal genitive partitive and pseudopartitive case is included in Flexion; see Figure 2.)
180
• APPE NDI X C •
a
Figure 22. The Pseudopartitlve In English syntax, stretch model
Figure 23 illustrates how each major node type dominates the node type directly below it in the tree, so that nodes K (case), including the primary functional constituents of the clause, dominate nodes M, which dominate the surface representation level nodes F. a
I
caseK
I
mood movement
I
M
flexional agreement
F
Figure 23. Structural node levels in English
• APPENDIX D •
Typology and Classifiers
C
ontemporary understanding of the typology of classifiers and other phoronyms is based on traditional grammatical studies, anthropological linguistics, and comparative functional typo
logy. The direction of research in the field has been defined by propo sals in the early typological work of Allan ( 1977) and Dixon ( 1982,
1986), which depend on a number of little-examined assumptions. In the most widely-cited of his publications on the subject, Dixon
(1986: I 08) says that classifiers constitute "a largish set of lexical items, in syntactic construction with the head noun" that, like noun class markers, "provide the means for categorisation of an object in terms of relevant parameters of world-view." Unlike noun class or gender
CONCORD markers, though, classifiers "are always separate
lexemes, which may be included with a noun in certain syntactic envi ronments . . .In many languages classifiers are required in the context of numeral quantification of a specific noun" (Dixon
1986: 1 05). He dis
tinguishes between "noun classes (a grammatical system) and noun classifiers (a lexical set) [, which] fulfill similar semantic roles in a language. They tend to occur in languages of different morphological
1986: Ill), namely "the well-established classification ( fusional), agglutinative, and isolating languages" (Dixon 1986: 109.1 This characterization thus includes ideas about the
types," (Dixon
into inflectional
I.
=
Dixon's claim that holistic language typology is "well-established" (cf. Dixon 1982: 218-219) has not been supportable within the field of typology per se for a very long time (Shibatani and Bynon 1995). Aikhenvald (2000) uses holistic typology throughout her work without qualification. Dixon's theory continues to be followed to a great extent by Ulbel (2000). A number of functional typologists working on noun classification systems, especially of American languages, including Aikhenvald (2000), Grinevald (Craig 1986a), Payne ( 1986, 1990b),
182
•
APPE NDI X D •
typology of classifiers and classifier systems, the typology of classifier languages, and the typology of languages. All of them call for reex amination.
The Typology of Classifier Systems While Dixon's view continues to be extremely influential (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Grinevald 2000; Lobel 2000), it must be noted that one thing it does not do is define exactly what classifiers really are, other than to say they are "lexical items" or "lexemes." That the classifiers of 'classifier languages' are derived from nouns, and are noun-like, or at least much more lexical in nature than the gender morphemes of 'gender languages', is well established (e.g., Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Lobel 2000; Senft 2000a; Craig 1994; Corbett 1991 )/ but it is also established that 'true' classifiers in Mandarin, Japanese, and most if not all other classifier languages, are by definition not the same as nouns. Even when ordinary nouns are or can be used as classifiers they appear to be denominalized (Stickney 2004a, 2004b; Lobel 2000). The emphasis that has been put on their relationship to or identity with nouns has resulted in deemphasis ofthe distinct morphosyntactic features that make them classifiers rather than ordinary nouns even when (as in English) they appear to be indistinguishable from them.3 Another viewpoint is reflected in the term "classificatory parti cles" (Zubin 1992; Senft 1 996, 2000), going back to Malinowski ( 1 920), instead of 'classifiers'. The term 'particle' implies a view of grammar akin to traditional treatments of the 'isolating' languages of China and Southeast Asia (q.v. Beckwith 2006a). In this view, "A numeral classifier system is an open set of classificatory particles and Barnes (1990), have taken 'concord' to be the same thing as 'agreement' (on both of which terms see Appendix E ) , and have therefore misanalyzed the systems in these languages. On holistic language typology see further below. 2.
Grinevald
(formerly Craig), citing Grinevald (2000), expresses
this as a
continuum of "systems of nominal classification," namely: "+-lexical (class terms, measure terms) ... lex.ico-grammatical (classifiers) ... grammatical (noun classes/gender)-+" (Grinevald and Seifart 2004: 261). This should however be revised; see below.
3.
For discussion of these phenomena, sec Chapters Two and Eight.
• TYPOLOGY AND CLASSIFIERS •
183
which are syntactically associated with numerals (in some languages, morphologically bound to them); they may also be associated with demonstratives, adjectives, or the noun itself. Typically, the particle appears once in the NP; however, agreement across elements of an NP does occur (e.g. in Thai or Kilivila). Particles may occur anaphorically in pragmatically focused (e.g. contrastive) discourse contexts" (Zubin 1992: 42). A more formal approach to the definition of phoronyms. is sug gested by a proposal of Fukui's ( 1 995), which would refine the orga nization of the lexicon according to the presence or absence of the fea tures F (functional) and L (lexical). He thus subdivides categories in the lexicon into four types: [+F, [+F, [-F, [-F,
-L]: +L]: +L]: -L]:
'pure' functional elements functional elements with lexical nature lexical categories (substantive elements) 'minor categories' (particles, etc.)
He notes, "Elements specified as [+F, +L] are functional elements which retain, to varying degrees, their characteristics as lexical categories, assuming that functional elements emerge from lexical categories .. .Instantiations of this type of category may be found in languages like Japanese and other East Asian languages" (Fukui 1995: 338 n. 3). This applies rather well to classifiers and other phoronyms. If the classifier-as a functional category, the phoronym-is by definition [+F] , its lexical equivalent is thus a noun [-FV
The Typology of Classifier Languages One of the most significant results of typological research on classifiers in the past several decades is the confirmation of the observation that noun classification systems-even gender (Unterbeck et al. 2000)-despite their different loci and forms, i.e., what are usually called types of noun classification, share similar basic ways of categorizing the world semantically (Grinevald and Seifart 2004;
4.
I disagree, however, with the inclusion of his fourth type [-F, -L], which seems to me to describe a non-linguistic form, or zero. Even interjections have function and lexical content.
184
•
APPENDIX D
•
Aikhenvald 2000: 308-351; Craig 1994; Denny and Creider 1986; Allan 1 977), though the specific selection that a particular noun classi fication system in a given language draws from this general pattern differs, depending on factors ranging from morphological locus to social structure (Aikhenvald 2000: 271-351; Senft 2000a). This is certainly an important fact, but it also has implications for the identi fication of classifier systems. It has very often been said that this or that language is a classifier language, normally meaning that it has (sometimes among other systems) an identified system of canonical sortal unit classifiers.5 Such systems have been studied most intensively in connection with the culturally and politically influential languages of East and Southeast Asia, which have some typological features in common, including the lack of obligatory number marking on unqualified count nouns (Greenberg 1972). On the basis of such studies, as well as work on less well known languages in other world areas (particular! y the Americas) that have similar characteristics, two important conclusions have been drawn: classifiers are a distinct grammatical category in classifier languages, and in order to have 'true' classifiers the language in question must have a 'classifier system' (Craig 1 994; Lehrer 1986; Allan 1 977). That is, the morphological locus in which suspected classifiers appear in a language must have a structure similar to that in already identified 'classifier languages'-as Allan ( 1 977: 286, 304) says, "Classifier lan guages can be distinguished from non-classifier languages on three criteria . . . (a) They have classifiers ... (b) They belong to one of four types . . . [including] numeral classifier languages ..." and (c) their classifiers categorize nouns "according to the inherent characteristics of the entities to which they refer." However, the circular method of identification would seem to be in need of revision,6 and the idea that sortal unit classifiers are a dis tinct morphological category different from that of, say, measures (or 'mensural classifiers') in classifier languages is definitely not univer-
5.
A great deal of tenninological confusion has been introduced by Grinevald and Aikhenvald, who call any noun-classifYing morpheme a 'classifier'. See Appendix E.
6.
Surprisingly, it has indeed been taken at face value by nearly all writers on classifiers. The definition of a classifier language as one that has classifiers certainly makes sense, but one must then define the classifier in its own right.
• TYPOLOGY AND CLASSIFIERS •
185
sally accepted (Senft 2000a). The phoronym, the morphological cate gory that includes classifiers and several other subtypes, has different grammatical status in different languages, ranging from syntactically governed noun to fully bound affix morpheme. It has not even been possible to establish a clear, cross-linguistically valid formal boundary between the sortal and mensural subtypes, despite many attempts to do so (see Chapters One and Two). Semantically, functional typologists are generally agreed that 'true' sortal classifiers, which do not measure or otherwise provide quantity information about a noun, are distinct from measures or 'mensural classifiers', which ..establish the unit to be counted" (Aik henvald 2000: 117). But due to the existence of many 'fuzzy' cases in classifier languages it has been suggested that quality and quantity would seem to represent opposite poles of a "semantic continuum" (Becker 1 975: 114). Moreover, languages differ in how they treat the same real-world referent grammatically, as is well known even from European languages (e.g.,furniture is non-count in English, but count in many other languages), as well as from comparison of European languages with Asian languages. For example, the word sheet in a sheet of paper, usually considered to be a 'measure' in English, corre sponds to the Mandarin sortal unit classifier zhang for flat things, in cluding tables and many other things as well as sheets of paper, and must in fact be a classifier in English too. As noted above, comparative typological research done by the same scholars who have drawn these conclusions has shown that the morphological form in which the feature of noun classification ap pears in a language is not fundamentally relevant to the basic parame ters of semantic categorization marked by the system.7 So many ex ceptions have been noted to Dixon's (I 986) morphological typology
7.
This view is questioned by Grinevald (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Craig 1994), who notes the influence of the morphological locus on a noun classification system's semantic structure. That is, the semantics deriving from the grammatical function of the grammatical category in which the noun classification system occurs seems to influence noun classifying semantics. While this i s undoubtedly correct, it appears to be of secondary importance, since the basic semantic categories are found in systems of nearly every type, as she herself�es. For an extended discussion of these problems see Aikhenvald (2000: 27I-35I).
186
•
APPENDIX
D •
that it has been abandoned as an explicit model by nearly all special ists in the field (cf. Aikhenvald 2000: 1 0). Nevertheless, the model continues to operate covertly. Categorical declarations continue to be made, to the effect that what appears to be a noun classification phenomenon in a given language is not one be cause the grammatical characteristics of its morphological locus in that language do not correspond exactly to the grammatical characteristics of the morphological locus of a similar system, which a scholar con siders to be a 'true' noun classification system, in another language. For example, Grinevald calls English classifiers "unit counters and measure terms." With respect to 'true' classifiers she says that, "unlike unit counters and measure terms, they exist in other contexts besides quantification and cover a much greater variety of semantic domains" (Craig 1994: 565; cf. Grinevald 2000). Yet it is well known and ac cepted even within functional typology that noun classification can and does occur in all language 'types' (on which see below) and in a wide range of morphological loci in languages-including determin ers, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, inflectional suffixes, class terms, and many others (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Senft 2000a; Aikhenvald 2000; Grinevald 2000, Craig 1994). The current functional typology approach to the identification of noun classification systems is there fore in need of reformulation. Many noun classification systems have probably not yet been identified because of the preconceptions of specialists about the type of morphological system in which a given type of noun classification is expected to occur. Their views also continue to be extended to the holistic language type in which a given variety of noun classification system is expected to occur-e.g., Thai is an isolating language with a classifier system, therefore it cannot have overt agreement (concord), despite the repeated references to its occurrence in specialized studies (Bisang 1999; Beckwith 1997; Zubin 1992).
Classifiers and the Typology of Languages Despite differences in terminology and linguistic approach, nearly all functional typology treatments of classifiers depend (explicitly or implicitly) on the holistic typological characterization of many East and Southeast Asian languages-e.g., Burmese, Mandarin, Thai, and
•
TYPOLOGY AND CLASSIFIERS
•
187
Vietnamese-as more or less purely 'isolating' in type. The assump tions that go along with this kind of typology8 carry with them tremendous implications for the study of classifiers, as well as all other grammatical elements in these languages. They include the premise that isolating languages have no 'morphology', but only 'syntax', and accordingly they do not have 'agreement', whether overt (i.e., concord) or covert.9 In this vein, Lobel (2000: 259) says, "gender and noun class systems are typical of fusional and/or agglutinative10 languages, while numeral classifier systems are typical of isolating languages," and adds, "The Vietnamese language may be regarded as the prototype of an isolating language" (Lobel (2000: 263). Her view closely follows Dixon's (1986) typological model, and like it depends ultimately on the acceptance of the ideas of holistic language typology. This traditional theory of language categorization, which is based on a summary characterization of the type of morphology a given lan guage is believed to have, thus continues to dominate the approach of many linguists. to classifiers, despite the fact that the old typology has gone through many radical transformations in modem times. From Sapir (1921) on, at least, different properties within individual lan guages have been characterized as belonging to one or another grada-
8.
The history of holistic typological characterization of languages is long and complex (Shibatani and Bynon 1995a). The typological division of languages into different types is no longer widely accepted. However, particular categories within the grammatical or phonological systems of particular languages do tend to follow a relatively small number of types. For a comparative typological study of noun classification systems, see Aikhenvald (2000), who however continues to rely on holistic types.
9.
The quotation marks are intentional; see below. Craig (1994: 565) says, "Some times noun class systems are referred to as 'concordia]', although the term may not be felicitous since, at some level, all classifiers are 'concordia)' to the extent that they are always in a relation of agreement with the noun they classify." This is an example of the confusion with regard to concord and other terms seen in much comparative work on noun classification systems; see Appendix E. For an extensive critique of the idea of 'isolating' morphology, see Beckwith (2006a).
I0. This claim, which goes back to Dixon ( 1986), has long been shown to be incorrect, since many agglutinative languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Uzbek, have well-known, fully grammaticized classifier systems (Aikhenvald 2000: 99, I02, 121 ). This typology is still followed in its essence by some specialists in classifier studies (e.g., Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Lobel 2000).
188
•
APPENDIX D •
tion or combination of morphological types,11 and Greenberg ( 1966) and others since have made great progress with a similar approach (Shibatani and Bynon 1995a). Yet it is a fact that the ideal language types are still with us. In particular, many flat statements-to the ef fect that language X is a classifier language while language Y is not a classifier language for one reason or another, and therefore does not, and cannot, have classifiers-are found throughout the literature from the beginnings of the modem functional typology approach to the study of classifiers down to the present (e.g., Aikhenvald 2000; Grine vald 2000; Craig 1994; Lehrer I 986; Lyons 1977; Allan 1977). Accordingly, a few words are in order here. What may be called the 'classical' holistic typology of languages goes back at least as far as Friedrich von Schlegel ( 1 808), at the be ginnings of modem linguistics (Shibatani and Bynon 1995a: 1-9). 12 This early form of typology soon developed into the theory that all languages belong to one of three (sometimes four or more) specific types, based on the nature of their morphology. The traditional basic types are fusional, agglutinative, and isolating. In a theoretically ideal fusional (or synthetic, or inflectional) lan guage, functional or derivational morphemes would not be clearly segmentable from lexical bases (word roots), which however could not occur alone without overt morphological marking. Frequently cited examples of attested 'fusional' languages, though far from the theo retical extreme, are Latin and Sanskrit. In an ideal agglutinative language all morphemes would be dis crete and would be attached mechanically one after another to form words. Frequently cited examples of 'agglutinative' languages, which are also very far from the theoretical extreme, include Turkish (a Turkic language) and Finnish (a Finno-Ugric language). Japanese (a Japanese-Koguryoic language) and Uzbek (a Turkic language) are also considered agglutinative languages. All of these languages have been
II. As Croft (1995: 95) puts it, "one must say that <:ONSTRUCflONS belong to a par ticular linguistic type, defined in tum by a set of structural features."
12. For detailed coverage and discussion of these issues, see this article and the other papers in the same volume (Shibatani and Bynon 1995) on different approaches to typology, both historically and at the present time. Holistic language characterization is discussed by several of them (Ram at 1995; Sgall 1995; Croft
1995) from different perspectives; all note the problems with the approach.
•
TYPOLOGY AND CLASSIFIERS
•
189
very heavily influenced by other languages, especially as regards their classifiers, many or most of which have been borrowed. Finally, and the most problematic of the three, is the ideal isolat ing language, in which all grammatical relations would be expressed purely by syntax, so there would be no distinctive functional morphol ogy at all. Frequently cited examples of 'isolating languages' are Mandarin Chinese and Thai, which (despite claims to the contrary) are very far indeed from the theoretical extreme, especially insofar as no modern Chinese or Thai linguist would contend that words in their languages do not have internal structure, and not even premodern Chi nese linguists would have agreed with the idea that there are no dis tinctive function morphemes in their language. It must also be noted that in the case of the 'isolating' type the languages belong to a spe cific phonological type, common throughout East and Southeast Asia, characterized by complex multi-level phonological systems (Ramat 1995: 35) based on sharply delimited syllables (q.v. Beckwith 2006a). No clear distinction is usually drawn between phonology and mor phology in the analysis of these 'isolating' languages, about which categorical typological declarations continue to be made based on this confusion (e.g., LObel 2000). This problem apparently goes back to the old 'Sino-Tibetan' theory, which lumped all 'monosyllabic' lan guages into one putative genetic family, and to even earlier theories, by which Japanese and other East Asian languages with sharply delim ited syllables were also included (the native Japanese writing system is purely syllabic, so early Western transcriptions were too). Since most scholars who work on East and Southeast Asian languages still follow the 'Sino-Tibetan' theory, many of the ideas it has generated have re mained largely unchallenged until very recently (Beckwith 2006a). I have made a concerted effort to avoid the above-noted pitfalls in the present work, which in the main follows the now widespread "par , tial typology . approach, involving more intensive investigation of "two or a small number of languages" (Shibatani and Bynon 1995: 916).
• APPENDIX
E •
Terminology
T
his book is written in the language of general linguistics so as to be understandable to readers of various backgrounds and
theoretical persuasions. Because those working in the function
al typology approach rarely
discuss
their sometimes
distinctive
customary usage of terms and concepts, while linguists working in formal frameworks have developed specific usages that are often at variance with the usage of most other linguists, the two terminological sets often do not agree. This should not be surprising. The over whelming bulk of theoretical and formal linguistic literature is still focused on English and other European languages,1 while much typological and descriptive literature focuses on languages of Asia, Africa, Australia, or the Americas. Linguists of the latter school long ago expanded the definition of linguistic terms in order to be able to discuss phenomena
that
are
not
very
different
from
the
same
phenomena in the most well-known European languages. Because the classifier systems that have been studied most intensively are nearly all in non-European languages, the normal meaning of some terms used in the literature on classifiers (and in the general description of the languages of East and Southeast Asia, among other areas) is often somewhat different from the 'encyclopedia' defmition of the terms. In order
to
avoid
MORPHOLOGY,
confusion, AGREEMENT,
therefore, NUMBER,
the
terms
and
PHORONYM,
concepts
CLASSIFIER,
PARTITIVE, PSEUDOPARTITIVE, CLASS NOUN, and related terms and
concepts, and the way they are used in this book, are clarified here. This discussion is not an attempt to revolutionize the study of these
I.
Cf. Ram at ( l 995: 44 ), who remarks on "the Eurocentric perspective which for so long has encumbered the development of linguistics."
192
• APPENDIX E
•
topics, or even the use of their respective terms in the study of phoro nyms and other phenomena, but only to clarity their meaning in this particular book.
Morphology The term MORPHOLOGY is known to all linguists, and would seem to be relatively non-controversial, at least as a term, so the reader may be tempted to skip this section. However, the usual understanding of mor phology is based specifically on descriptions of European, Semitic, Uratic, Turkic, and other languages that have heavily fusional or ag glutinative morphology. Many East and Southeast Asian languages seem to be strikingly different in this respect. The usual assumption is that they have 'little' or 'no' morphology. The far-reaching theories that have been constructed on the basis of this idea have had a significant effect on the understanding of classifiers and other phoro nyms and the construction in which they occur, and consequently necessitate the present discussion of what 'morphology' means in such languages. Zwicky (1992: I 0) defines MORPHOLOGY straightforwardly as "the analysis of words." However, he notes that "portmanteaus like French du" must be considered as "a single word from the viewpoint of morphology, even though for syntactic purposes it must be seen as composed of two parts." On the other hand, "the English serial verb construction does not allow material to intervene between its two verbs: I'll look, *I'll go there look, *I'll go out look." In view of such facts, he suggests that "morphology and syntax form a single compo nent of linguistic description," morphosyntax, and "the break between words and morphemes is no more special than the break between phrases and words." There are differences, however. "Morpheme or der is fixed, but alternative word orders for the same meaning are common. Many word-internal morphemes are bound, but most words can occur free. Constituents of words cannot be separated by inter posed syntactic units, but constituents of phrases often can be" (Zwicky 1992: 1 1 ). Finally, "morphological rules are not contingent on the syntactic surroundings of the words they describe, except inso far as this environment requires word forms belonging to certain in flectional categories or lexemes belonging to certain syntactic catego-
•
T E R M I N O LOGY •
193
ries . . . For instance, whether a noun stem can be pluralized, or which declension class its plural form is drawn from, depends only upon properties of the stem itself-not upon the sort of syntactic construc tion in which it fmds itself' (Zwicky 1992: 12). According to this view of morphology, phoronyms (including classifiers) may be characterized as morphemes that are morphosyn tactically partly bound and partly free (the degree of their boundedness being language-specific), while class terms and qualifier terms are completely bound constituents of words known as class nouns. None of this should detract attention from the fact that the normal usage of the term 'morpheme' includes both monomorphemic 'words' and 'word stems' that have radically differing phonological shapes from language to language. As one typical description puts it, morphology covers "word formation," the "parts of speech system," and "inflec tional morphology."2 All three morphological topics are necessary components of any comprehensive description of the languages dis cussed in this book, regardless of preconceived notions of their �or phological 'type'.3 In the present discussion, it must be emphasized that all languages have morphology, including East and Southeast Asian languages that have phonologically sharply delimited syllables regardless of word structure or supposed holistic morphosyntactic type.4 These same Ian-
2. 3.
4.
From the list of subjects coveed r in the announcement on Linguist List of the publication ofSylvia Luraghi's 2005 monograph on ancient Greek. The notion of 'word' is highly complex, and the subject of a considerable literature. In a recent volume of studies on the topic, Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002: 1 1 ) quote the view of Chao (1968: 146-147), which focuses on the criterion of juncture, and they discuss other parameters, including syllable structure and suprasegmental features such as tone, but the book does not cover the languages of East and Southeast Asia, virtually none of which are mentioned-for example, despite the attention to Chao's views on juncture, even Mandarin Chinese is mentioned only once. On the widespread use of holistic typology by functional typologists writing about classifiers and other forms of noun classification (e.g., Aikhenvald 2000, Dixon 1986), see Appendix D. The feature of sharply demarcated syllables is an areal phonetic feature, found for example in Tibetan and even in Japanese (which languages are agglutinative according to the holistic view) as well as in Mandarin, Thai, and Vietnamese (isolating languages according to t!he holistic view). See also the following note. ·For a detailed discussion of the general view of what morphology is in East and Southeast Asian linguistics, and for the theory
194
• APPENDIX E
•
guages tend to have classifiers, though not all of them do, and they lack obligatory plural marking. But the idea that they lack morphology is incorrect. The failure to distinguish morphological and purely pho netic features in these languages has caused a great deal of confusion, not only in classifier studies but in many subfields of linguistics.
Agreement and Concord The type of phoronym that has so far been the most extensively studied is the sortal unit classifier. The overriding point of interest in classifiers, from the very beginning of their study to the present, is the feature of categorization [CLASS] encoded by them. As noted by Lehman ( 1990), to the extent that classification is indeed marked by classifiers/ the feature actually belongs to that of AGREEMENT. In general linguistics, 'agreement' is widely understood to refer to overt morphological marking of one or more shared features-which can be other features besides noun class--on more than one constitu ent of a clause. It is best known from Latin, German, Russian, and a number of other European languages. However, the term 'agreement' is actually used in a broader sense than this in specialist works on gender and classifiers, including nearly all those cited in this book. Corbett remarks, "there is no generally accepted definition" of agree ment, though the "essential point is the covariance or matching of fea tures between two separate elements, such as noun and adjective." He also notes that many writers "treat 'concord' as synonymous with agreement" (Corbett 1994: 55).6 Although he here takes 'agreement' to mean overt concord, he does not comment further on this problem atic issue. Similarly, Grinevald (Craig 1994: 565) remarks, "at some level, all classifiers are 'concordia!' to the extent that they are a! ways in a relation of agreement with the noun they classify."7
of 'phonemic' tone and other problems arising from the theory of the 'isolating language', see Beckwith (2006a).
5.
He ultimately argues against this particular idea (Lehman 1979, 1990).
6.
E.g., Zubin (1992: 42).
7.
The confusion of 'agreement' (overt or covert) and 'concord' (overt agreement only) by Grinevald (Craig 1986a: 4) and Payne (1986: 126-1 27), and following them, many others since, has given rise to some serious problems concerning
•
TERMINOLOGY
•
195
This is not a simple terminological disagreement. Failure to rec ognize the important distinction between CONCORD and AGREEMENT continues to cause confusion even in specialist studies of agreement phenomena (where sometimes the term 'concord' is used to refer to covert agreement), while in formal work the term 'agreement' [AGR ] is regularly used to mean both concordia! and non-concordia! agree ment (e.g., Fukui 1995: 335).8 Corbett remarks, "There is a question as to whether the determination of the form of anaphoric pronouns (as in examples like the gir/ . she) is a part of agreement. Most mainstream work on agreement uses the term in the wid·er sense to include pro nouns" (Corbett 1994: 55).9 That is, the meaning of AGREEMENT in Corbett's view is usually taken to be the same as CONCORD, or overt agreement, but it is also used for English pronominal agreement, which is strictly covert. In fact, nearly all work on agreement and gender, whether formal or functional, actually includes both covert and overt marking. Yet it is regularly stated that the definition of the term 'agreement' is, spe cifically, overt marking alone. This is obviously not an acceptable state of affairs. It must be stressed that 'concord' and 'agreement' are distinct. The terms do not mean the same thing. AGREEMENT refers to marking, either overt or covert, of one or more features (which can be other fea tures besides noun class10) including two or more constituents of a clause. By contrast, CONCORD refers, explicitly and exclusively, only ..
noun classification morphology in the languages hey t examine. Grinevald later uses the term 'concord' correctly (Grinevald and Seifart 2004: 24). 8.
The use of 'agreement' to include covert agreement, as in English pronominal gender, as well as overt agreement (as in English number) is contrasted by Fukui ( 1 995: 335) with Chinese and Japanese, which he says have "no AGRs at all." He also says Japanese, a classifier language, "does not have AGR" or "lacks AGR" (Fukui 1995: 360). Japanese certainly does not have overt agreement (concord), but it does have covert agreement in its pronominal system (like English; though granted, not 'strongly', because [pronouns are optional in Japanese), and of course in its well-known classifier system.
9.
He also cites the 1988 dissertation of M. Barlow, who "reviews the research and concludes that there are no good grounds for distinguishing between agreement and antecedent-anaphora relations" (Corbett 1994: 55}.
10. Concordial nominal agreement marking in Finnish, for example, does not include noun classification as a portmanteau feature, unlike nominal agreement in Latin, Russian, and Arabic.
•
196
APPENDIX E
•
to overt morphological marking of shared features on two or more constituents of a sentence.11 Noun classification-including that found in gender systems as well as in classifier systems-is considered to be one of the inherent semantic parameters of nouns (Talmy 1 992). By contrast, it is widely considered that agreement of most types-other than the gender type, which is taken in "most mainstream work on agreement" to include both overt concordia! noun-inflection markers and covert pronominal markers (Corbett 1994: 55)-is not inherent in the noun. In other words, the inflectional12 morphology of languages that typically have overt agreement is largely ..gained" syntactically and "nouns and pro nouns are considered the normal agreement controllers" (Corbett 1994: 56). Moreover, "synchronic accounts of agreement require ref erence both to syntax and semantics" (Corbett 1994: 59), a remark as true (or even more so) for classifier systems as it is for gender and noun classes. Since there are systems that involve both covert and overt agreement, such as Kilivila (Senft 2000a, 1996), 13 it would seem useful to summarize the above-mentioned distinctions as follows. NOMINAL AGREEMENT exists when one or more dependent con stituents of a Noun Phrase (or elsewhere in a sentence) mark(s) the same category as the noun head. When the category so marked is se mantic, it is NOUN CLASSIFICATION AGREEMENT. When the marker morpheme has discrete, overt analogues on two or more constituents of the NP, it is overt or CONCORDIAL AGREEMENT-what is sometimes referred to as full GENDER marking (e.g., Russian gender agreement or Swahili noun class agreement). When the marker morpheme has no discrete, overt analogues on the noun head or on other constituents of
II. The confusion is due to the typical concordial-i.e., overt-gender marking of classical European languages. In what sounds at first like a reversal of the usual view,
Allan (1977: 286) perceptively calls languages with gender or noun class
systems ..concordial classifier languages."
12. This traditional sense of the term 'inflection' (or 'flexion') is followed in this book. The very special usage of 'inflection' (usually abbreviated lnjl or I) in the field of formal syntax (where it is unfortunately also used in its traditional sense) is mostly avoided.
13. Senft
(2000:
19) cites two Kilivila sentences with classifiers that have overt or
concordia! agreement (they are marked on two or more constituents of the but also cove.rt agreement, in that there is no overt marker on the noun.
NP),
• TERMINOLOGY •
197
the NP or clause, it is covert or NON-CONCORDIAL AGREEMENT, as in English personal pronoun 'natural gender' agreement, Chinese unit classifier agreement, and English group classifier agreement. In both overt and covert types of noun classification agreement, the constituents correspond or 'agree' according to semantic cate gories applied to them by the speakers of the language. It is cJear that classifiers exhibit agreement because they are controlled by the se mantics of their noun referents expressed overtly (in the pseudo partitive phrase or anaphoricaJly in the discourse) or pragmatically. Studies of the complex classifier-like noun classes of some Amazo nian languages (e.g., Grinevald and Seifart 2004) show that the essen tial difference between classifiers on the one hand and gender or noun class markers on the other is thus after all in morphology, as noted already by Allan ( 1977; cf. Dixon 1986; 1982), not in semantics.14
Number The collocation of a determiner and/or numeral plus a phoronym has the function of specifying15 the noun in a pseudopartitive construction for NUMBER (Rijkhoff 2002: 340; Greenberg 1 972, 1978; cf. Simpson 2005). Unlike agreement, number is one of the non-inherent semantic parameters of nouns (Talmy 1992). In the languages treated in this book, number means essentially the marking of singular or plural.16 In the literature it is usual to treat English count nouns as either singular
14. The agreement types treated in this book are mostly- those connected to classifiers and related phenomena. For the interesting and important agreement (whether nominal or otherwise) that occurs in gender and noun classes and in conjunction with verbs and other categories, see Unterbeck et al. (2000) and Corbett (1991 ); see Aikhenvald (2000) for some of the other types of noun classification. Gender in European languages and the noun class markers of African languages (Grinevald and Seifart 2004; Denny and Creider 1986) also mark number. 15. Few linguists agree on the meaning of the term specification, or on the meaning of the "rather ill-defined" term specifier (Trask 1993: 256). In fact, "there is no universally agreed definition of what a specifier is" (Radford 1997: 91). I generally us·e specification to refer to the function(s) of the determiner/numeral constituent(s) marking the head noun for number; see below. 16. There are other 'numbers', including dual, trial, paucal, etc. See Corbett (2000) for comprehensive treatment and bibliography.
198
• APPENDIX E •
or plural: "The formal expression of the plural in English is usually the addition of an ending, as in magazines, heads, while the singular is usually signalled (on nouns) by the absence of such a marker" (Corbett 2000: 4). He says more specifically, "In English we are usually forced to choose between singular and plural when we use a noun" (Corbett 2000: 9), and remarks, "number is an inflectional category in English: dog (singular) and dogs (plural) are forms of the same lexical item DOG" (Corbett 2000: 6). Similarly, Cruse ( 1 994: 2859) says, "English has an asymmetrical system in which only the plural has an overt mark" (cf. Beard 1992: 13 1). Cruse ( 1 994: 2859) adds, "This follows what seems to be a universal pattern, namely, that if one of the terms of a number system has no overt marker, that term is invariably singular."17 Corbett (2000: 81-82) does discuss recategorization, in which a noun "usually treated as unbounded (mass) is treated as bounded (count)," citing the classic example "There was dog all over the road". He also discusses Allan's ( 1 980) treatment, according to which "the traditional view labelling nouns as count or mass in the lexicon is inadequate; the distinction should be one relating to noun phrases rather than to nouns. In other words, it is substantially a matter of syntax."18 Unfortunately, Corbett does not dis·cuss the overt, obligatory marker of singular number for otherwise unspecified count nouns in English, the preposed phrasal clitic a-lan-, though he describes the same kind of marking for other languages. He says, "One type of clitic attaches to a particular type of phrase, hence the more specific term for these, namely 'phrasal affixes'," and giving an example from Dogan, he notes, "it is not required to attach to, say, a noun (as a Russian in flection might be), rather it simply appears last in the noun phrase and attaches to the preceding element" (Corbett 2000: 152)-exactly like the English singular number marker. Corbett's Dagon analysis is adopted in the present boolk and applied to both the singular and the
17. Although Cruse (1994: 2860-2861) covers "Recategorization of Mass and Count Nouns," the only formal difference between the marking used to distinguish the two is again the plural marker. 18. Corbett (2000: 81 n. 22), citing Jackendoff, notes that the conversion of mass nouns to count "is sometimes said to result from the operation of the 'universal packager'," while that of count to mass results "from the 'universal grinder'."
•
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•
199
plural number markers in English, as well as to phrasal markers other languages (e.g., Japanese, Mandarin) that work the same way.
m
Phoronym and Classifier Although classifiers constitute a remarkable set of phenomena well worth specialized study, it is difficult to find an actual clear definition of them in the literature.19 In fact, they are one of several subtypes of morpheme that occur in what formalists refer to as the 'N 1 position '20 of the pseudopartitive construction. All of the subtypes perform the same basic grammatical function. Classifiers are thus not an independent grammatical category of their own. The failure of most functional typologists to recognize this fact has resulted not only in massive confusion about what classifiers are and do-with the con comitant introduction of serious terminological confusion, most visi bly in the title of Aikhenvald's (2000) survey of noun classification systems21-but also in the lack of a term for the grammatical category
19. The closest Craig (1994: 565, 569) gets to defining what classifiers are is to say they are "part of the lexicon of the language" and "appear in the context of quantification, always next to or- bound to a number or quantifier". 20. See Chapter Two. 21. In particular, non-concordia! noun class markers are now sometimes called 'noun classifiers', following Grinevald's usage (Craig 1 977, 1986b, et seq.). In her writings she has extended the meaning of 'classifier' to include all varieties of noun classification marker accepted as such by her, and her usage has been taken over more or less unchanged by Aikhenvald (2000). This creates severe terminological confusion. The term 'classifier' had a fairly clear identity before hand, and is still normally understood by linguists of all persuasions to be essen tially what these two scholars (and some non-specialists who depend on their works) call the 'numeral classifier'. The usual practice in most specialist works on classifiers (e.g., L11bel 2000) is still to mention the problem of nomenclature and the fact that 'numeral classifier' is a misnomer, and then call classifiers simply 'classifiers'. Very many linguists have used the term 'noun classifier' (or 'nominal classifier') at one time or another to refer to ordinary classifiers (Grine vald and Aikhenvald's 'numeral classifiers'). Although this usage has been abandoned to a large extent, it has by no means been completely abandoned, and some older articles that use it are still required reading in the field. It would seem highly desirable to avoid more confusion and abstain from any further muddying of the already extremely unclear terminology in this field. I have therefore not used the term 'noun classifier' at all (other than in direct quotations) in this book.
• APPENDIX E •
200
to which classifiers belong. As long noted and discussed beginning at least with Allan ( 1 977), classifiers occur within a more widely-defined morphological category, though the question of just what that category might be has largely been ignored. Regrettably, formal typologists also have no explicit, precise term for this grammatical category, which could be described somewhat clumsily as the 'pseudopartitive function term'. In all forms of noun classification there is no clear line between genuinely classifying forms and other non-classifying forms belonging to the same grammatical category (Senft
1996: 6 , 2000a: 2 1 ). Even in
languages where differences have been observed to occur (Aikhenvald
2000: 1 1 4-120), those languages rarely distinguish among them. Some classifier specialists not only attempt to define the differences,22 they object to discussing classifiers in the same breath with other forms that fill the same function, and would restrict the term 'classi fier' (in the sense used in this book) to unit classifiers, which they re fer to as the 'pure' or 'true' classifier (Grinevald 2000, Craig
1994). It
is thus paradoxically non-controversial, even in the functional typol ogy literature, that besides classifiers per se (or 'true' classifiers) other forms can occur in the 'classifier slot' of the 'classifier phrase' (i.e., the pseudopartitive construction, q.v. below). These include mensural like forms such as English
chunk, non-categorizing or minimally
categorizing 'default' classifiers, 'repeaters' (a copy of the noun), and so forth. Grammatically, ali of them are the same. In conjunction with a numeral or determiner they specify their head noun for NUMBER i.e., they help mark whether the noun referent is singular (a unit) or plural (a plurality of units23 or a set of units24), though this is not the function of the classifier by itself, but of the specifier-classifier collo cation in a pseudopartitive construction. Greenberg ( 1 974:
21) claims
that classifiers are all "merely so many ways of saying 'one' or, more accurately 'times one'." This is not, however, quite accurate.
22. See Chapters One through Four for discussion and references to the relevant literature.
23. Cf. LObel (2000: 278-279}; however, her partiti ve interpretation should be reexamined in the light of Chapter Two.
24. I.e., a unit composed of units, what Lehman ( 1 979) calls a 'power set'. In this book the phoronym
in question is called the 'group classifier'.
•
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•
201
Although there are differences among classifier subtypes, it is not true that 'mensural' types such as those with the meaning of a con tainer-e.g., mug in a mug of beer-are unlike 'sortal' types in that they refer primarily to the container, or that they are partitives because they supposedly represent a specified quantity of the total amount of the mass noun referent in the world. Languages that have number agreement, such as English, show that the normal, unmarked referent of the expression is actually to the head noun, in this example, beer, and in particular, to the totality of beer in the mug. As with 'sortal' classifiers, the noun referent is a whole, by definition, and the classi fier refers to it. As shown in Chapter Two, this is due to the fact that the constructions involved are pseudopartitives, which syntactically contain one full noun. They are sharply distincf5 from partitives, which contain two full nouns. What is needed, therefore, is a simple, clear term for the wider grammatical category to which classifiers and other forms that fill the same function belong (Senft 1996: 6, Senft 2000a: 2 1 ), so it can be discussed unambiguously. Allan ( 1977) says classifiers mark units, or 'unitize'. Similarly, Lyons (1977: 462) says they 'individualize' and Senft (2000a: 27) too says, "Classifiers individuate nouns." But in fact, they do not always mark units, or 'individualize'. Allan and many others have attempted to define classifiers according to the semantics of sortal unit classifiers alone, specifically excluding mensural classifiers, group classifiers, and other phoronyms from their purview. Some similarly note that classifiers, measures, etc., are all used in counting things, so they have called them 'counters', or 'numeratives' (Hamdamov 1 983). Bisang (1999: 1 20) uses 'numerative' as a "cover term for classifier and quantifier," a usage supported by Senft (2000a)/6 following Bloomfield (1933: 237), who may have followed Kruisinga (1932, II: 33 et seq.).27 Many others, such as Aikbenvald
25. The distinction happens to be much less clear in English than it is in many other languages; see Chapter Two. 26. However, he himself uses the archaic term 'classificatory particle', following Malinowski ( 1 920), the pioneer of Kilivila studies.
27. The first edition ofKruisinga's work was published in 191 1-1916, so this is one of the oldest terms used for the category in question. He essentially defines 'numerative' as "a noun used before. . . plural words with the function of avoiding
202
•
APPENDIX E •
(2000), use 'numeral classifier', which is, if anything, worse. But as widely noted, numerals and numbering have nothing to do with classi fiers themselves, as categorizing morphemes. Moreover, classifiers, repeaters, and other fonns that fill the same grammatical function can be used with determiners and adjectives instead of or together with numerals, depending on the language. Much more importantly than all of this, though, is the serious problem that quite a few linguists mis takenly consider the classifier itself to enumerate or count. In fact, NUMERALS belong to a completely separate constituent of the pseudo partitive construction, the QUANTIFIER. 28 Terms that allow or suggest confusion of these constituents must be avoided. This brings up what is perhaps the most widely used tenn in func tional typology work on classifiers, namely 'quantifier', which is used without comment by many typologists writing on classifiers, e.g., by Downing ( 1 996) in her important discussion of 'quantifier' float in Japanese; cf. Senft (1996). Some give it a specific sense. Adams (1989: 3) uses 'quantifier' to mean 'measure'. Bisang ( 1 999: 120) also uses the tenn 'quantifier' for morphemes "used for measuring,'.' spe cifically contrasting it with 'classifier'. Aikhenvald (2000: 1 1 5- 1 16) often does not distinguish clearly between measures or 'mensural clas sifiers' and what she calls •quantifiers', sometimes meaning quantifi ers in the normal sense (e.g., "much . . . many"). These unclear or care less usages are the result and cause of much confusion. Classifiers do not themselves quantify their noun referents; that job is carried out by another grammatical category, the QUANTIFIER, which includes the subcategory of the NUMERAL. Since a quantifier (or a detenniner, or both) occupies one of the three minimum obligatory constituents of a full pseudopartitive construction, the term QUANTIFIER must be kept the collocation of an indefinite article or numeral and a plural noun. When such words have no meaning of their own they are called numeratives" (Kruisinga 1932, II: 33). The way some linguists who are native speakers of classifier languages have used the term 'numerative' approaches the idea of the phoronym as I have defined it. 28. I use the term QUANTIFIER in this book only in the standard, well-established sense usual in formal grammar. Some formalists have however used the term rather loosely, so that QUANTIFIERS are not clearly distinguished from DETERMINERS, e.g., "a quantifier such as many could be labelled either as D (by virtue of being a determiner) or as Q (by virtue of being a quantifying determiner)" (Radford 1997: 68). The two categories also should be kept clearly distinct. See Chapter Two and Appendix C.
•
T E R M I NOLOGY
203
•
distinct from the cover term used for classifiers and other forms that fill the same grammatical function. A few have used 'specifier' as the term for the general category that includes classifiers (Beckwith ams
1989:
1998;
Huffman
1970,
cited in Ad
3). However, that term is often used with a different mean
ing, particularly in formal syntax, where it i s an established term though not a very clear one29-and it enters into the formal analysis of pseudopartitive constructions. SPECIFIER is used
in th s i book to
refer
to determiner and numeral constituents that either alone, or together with a classifier, 'measure', etc., in a pseudopartitive construction, specifY a head noun for number. Having examined each of the terms that have been used for the grammatical functions of classifiers,30 including the verbs that have been used to categorize the general behavior of classifier-like forms, it is clear that due to conflicting or unclear semantics none are accept able as an umbrella term for the category of the 'pseudopartitive func tion term'.
No
suitable term seems to be available in non-linguistic
fields such as mathematics, either. It has therefore been necessary to come up with a new term not previously used by anyone for a functional grammatical term. After much searching, I have coined the neologism PHORONYM, modeled on
'
anaphora and metaphor,32 for the 'N1' of the formal literature.
Greek pheronym,3 which suggests both
the 'pseudopartitive function term',
Since it seems that PHORONYM has not hitherto been used by anyone as a grammatical term, it is hereby adopted for this purpose, with the following specific definition: PHORONYM is lhe tenn for the pseudopartitive function tenn, the grammatical category to which unit classifiers, group classifiers, repeaters, measures, and other fonns that perform the same basic grammatical function belong.
29. See note I5 above. 30.
Of unused possibilities, most similarly indicate something that is not relevant to all of the forms that must be included.
3 1 . The stem phor- is an o-grade nominal ('carrying') frompher- '(to) bear, carry'. 32. These are typical functions of classifiers (and other phoronyms), which refer to
the head noun indirectly and mostly can be used anaphorically-i.e., the head noun can be omitted where understood from the context.
• APPENDIX E •
204
No other meaning-Greek, etymological, semantic, functional, liter ary, or whatever-is intended by this usage or should be imputed to it. The type of noun phrase in which phoronyms occur should then ideally be called a 'phoronym phrase', after the model of the 'classi fier phrase' of functional typology. However, it has already been la belled the 'pseudopartitive construction' in the field of formal typol ogy, and in order to avoid further terminological confusion I have re tained the term and generally use it throughout the book. Because much of my discussion concerns the classifier subtype specifically, when I refer to phenomena or the literature on them that are more or less exclusively connected to the sortal unit or group clas sifier subtype of phoronym, I generally use the term 'classifier' alone. When the phenomena or the literature on them include other types of phoronyms, such as repeaters, mensural classifiers, and so on, or when my discussion focuses on their grammatical form or the pseudoparti tive construction, I generally use the term PHORONYM alone. In in stances where it is helpful for clarity's sake, I use both.
Partitive and Pseudopartitive In the general linguistic literature, the
PARTITIVE CASE is best known from the Finnish language, in which it not only has a distinct form and function, it is one of the three primary cases along with the nominative and genitiven (all other cases being built on stems of one or another of the primary cases).}4 In recent English-based formal linguistic work
33.
I use the tenn 'genitive' also for the inherited English morphological case -sl-es as well
as
the case marked by the prepositional morpheme of Some English
specialists do not use the term. 34. There are two views on this. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001: 534), like many others, considers the partitive to be "one of the four central grammatical cases in the Finnish language," evidently referring to the accusative as the fourth case. However, although accusative functions do remain in the modem language, they are marked with fonns that have merged with those of other cases. The accusative is thus often omitted from discussions of case fonns in Finnish, and the language is considered to have three primary cases. Since it is desirable to maintain the maximum degree o f descriptive and tenninological accuracy, especially when forms and functions do not perfectly coincide, I prefer to drop the accusative from descriptions of the modem Finnish overt case marking
•
TERMINOLOGY
•
205
the term PARTITIVE has come to be used for a particular construction, the PARTITIVE CONSTRUCTION, or 'true partitive', because it refers to parts of things. This is generally marked in Finnish not by the partitive case (partitiivi) but by the elative case (elatiivi).35 The partitive construction contrasts in very important ways, semantically and grammatically, with the PSEUDOPARTATIVE, the construction in which classifiers, repeaters, and other phoronyms obligatorily occur. For examples of the overt morphological case that marks the HEAD NOUN (N2)36 in pseudopartitive constructions, the traditional term PARTITIVE CASE is used. For the overt morphological case that marks the PHORONYM (N1) in pseudopartitive constructions in English and some other languages,37 the term PSEUDOPARTITIVE CASE is used. Chapter Two discusses partitive and pseudopartitive constructions and pseudopartitive case morphology. It also shows how and why 'pseu dopartitive' is a particularly unfortunate term.
Class Noun Of the two constituents of CLASS NOUNS, the CLASS TERM was apparently first identified in Thai by Haas ( 1964, 1 942), but unfortunately it and the QUALIFIER TERM, the other constituent, have been widely misunderstood or ignored, or both. The internal semantic structure of compound nouns in English has been analyzed in detail in a number of studies (Ryder 1994; McCarthy 1 99 1 ; Warren 1 978), and some attention has been given to the internal structure of compounds in other languages, such as Mandarin (Anderson 1 985), but these studies have focused on the semantic structure of the different compositional types of compounding (McCarthy 199 1 : 3 1 9). They do not recognize the fact that in English, as well as in Japanese, Mandarin, Thai, Tibetan, and many other languages, large sets of nouns with shared formal heads can share certain class properties. The system, but retain it for the c'overt system. It should also be noted that my treatment ignores the many other uses of the partitive case in Finnish. on which see Kiparsky ( 1998a, 1998b). 35. For discussion see Chapter Two. 36. For the sigla N 1 and N2 see Chapter Two. 37. In some other European languages (e.g., German) the phoronym has an overt zero marker.
206
• APPENDIX E
•
members of such form sets are called CLASS NOUNS.38 The formal, lexical, or morphological head constituent of a class noun is called the CLASS TERM and the qualifier constituent the QUALIFIER TERM. Unfortunately, there has been considerable terminological and conceptual confusion about class nouns in the scanty references to them in the literature.39 Bisang ( 1 999, 1 993) uses the term 'class noun', which refers to the compound as a whole, for 'class term'. which refers to one part of it.40 Similarly, Aikhenvald (2000: 214) re marks with regard to examples she quotes from Thai, "They have been frequently interpreted as 'class nouns'," and cites DeLancey ( 1986: 440-44 1). However, although DeLancey's article does indeed have a very interesting discussion of class nouns, he nowhere uses the term 'class noun', and he does use 'class term' correctly. As examples, Aikhenvald (2000: 87) cites berry "in the English combinations straw berry, blue-berry, black-berry," incorrectly using 'class noun' instead of'class term' for berry. The significance of class nouns for the present study Jies in their relationship both to classifiers and to gender. This is shown by the fact that in Thai the formal head of a class noun, the class term, can be a classifier (DeLancey 1986), and can agree with the classifier of the class noun as a whole to form overt gender concord (q..v. Chapter Seven). In Tibetan, the qualifier terms of honorific class nouns (q.v. Chapter Six) are the locus of a distinctive system of noun classifica tion akin to the classifier type semantically but related structurally to gender.
38. As noted above, the tenn 'class·noun' was used in traditional English grammars (Sweet 1900; Kruisinga 1932), but more or less in the sense of' count noun•. 39. Part of the confusion may be due to my own failure to clarify the difference between class tenn and class noun in what seems to be the first article in which the tenn class noun is used in its modem sense (Beckwith 1992b). The source of the confusion appears to be the fact that class tenns usually also occur as full nouns by themselves. 40. His examples of Mandarin class tenns unfortunately include semantically empty noun suffixes, such as -tou (Bisang 1999: 174-175), which have nothing to do with class nouns. He also argues, following Grinevald (Craig 1994) and others, based on DeLancey's ( 1986) interpretation of Thai data, that class tenns are an important source of classifiers (Bisang 1999: 175). This does not seem to be the case. Sec Chapter Seven.
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Index
ablative marker, 59-63 Adams, K.L., 202 adjectives, 2-3 insertion, I I, 15-17, 36, Mandarin, 3, 1 1 , 15-17,46 definition, 16-17, 1 7n.28 Thai, 3 Tibetan, 129-131, 138, 138n.l9 African languages, 1 29, 197n.14 agreement, 99, 194-197 concordia), 127, 129, 140, 146-147, 176 classifier, 1 1 8-119, 127, 158, 195n.8 gender. See gender honorific register, 128-129 number, 32, 70 semantic, 69-70, 120 Aikhenvald, A., vii n.l, xvii n.2, xviii n.4, xx, xxii, xxii n.9, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 4, 18-19, 36n.59, 37n.60, 68, 79, 83, 94,97-98, 1 0 1 n.8, 104, 120n.l3, 128n. l , 140n. l, 1 76, 1 8 1 n.1, 1 87n.8, 199, 202, 206 Allan, K., xvii, xix, 38, 95, 97, 125, 159, 162, 170, 1 7 1 , 1 8 1 , 184, 196n. 1 1 , 197, 198, 200, 201 allegro speech, I I American languages, 2, 1 8 1 n.l, 1 84, 197 anaphora, 9-10, 36-37,98, 1 2 1 , 203
taxonomic constraint on, 1 18-122 zero .anaphora, 9, 122 with repeaters, 101-102 Arabic, xxiii Austronesian languages, 2. autoclassifier. See repeater automeasure, 18-19, 30n.46, 169-171
Becker, A., 12, 28, 29, 104 Berlin, B., xvii bibliography xxvi Bisang, W., 95, 9Sn.2, 152n.l2, 153, I 55, 20 I, 202, 206, 206n.40 Bloomfield, L., 20 I boundaries, semantic 69 Burmese, xix, xx, 2, 12, 1 7n.29, 67, 78, 100, 1 04, 104n.l2, 148n.7, 159-160, 186
categorization, 34, 162-166 children's, 162-163 classifier, xix-xx, 34-36, 1 25-126 class term, 133-134 grammatical limits on, 125 noun categorization, I 08-1 09, 162 morphosyntactic locus of, I 08-109
• INDEX •
218 category, categories
classifier, 32, I l l, 1 1 8-1 20, 123124, 125-126, 158, 163 grammatical, 1 2 1 , 127 class term, 135-1 36, 136n.15 functional, I J J-127 gender, 124-127, 158 grammatical, vii, xvii
origins diachronically, 7, 172-174 prototypical, 1 1 1- 1 14 relationship to nouns, 2-9, 12, 17, 17n.29 sortal, 3, 12-17, 28-29,63-66, 7 1 , 97, 99, 157 taxonomic, 69,77-81, 1 1 1- 1 2 1 , 157
ofcategory. See hyperphoronym
terminology, 199n.21, 199-204
prototype, I l l
unit, 128, 157
register. See register class Chao, Y.R., 3 , 3n.8, 8, 30, 30n.45, 3 1 , 35n.55,43n.l2,67, 92n.30, 169, 172n.7, 172-173, 193n.3 Chinese, xix, xxiv, 2, 7n.17, 22, 3 1n.49, 53n.25, 63n.34, 68, 100n.7, 124n.20, 129n.2, 135, 1 35nn.J2-13, 137, 155, 156n.l4, 160- 1 6 1 , 167, 189, 195n.8, 197. See also Mandarin Early Old Chinese, 155 loanwords, 155 Old Chinese, J37n.J7 See also Mandarin Chomsky, N., 53
variation, 1 1-12, 103-106 classifier language, xix, 75-76, 9 1 , 9497, 109- 1 1 0 classifier phoronym. See classifier classifier phrase. See pseudopartitive class noun,xxv,87, 128-1 39, 140-146, 205-206 constituents, 130, 133n.9, 140-141, 147-156, 205-206 terminology, 1 4 1 , 148-149, 205206 types, 147-151 class tenn. See class noun, constituents cognition, 125, 162-166
class, feature of, 158
animal, 163-16 7
classification. See categorization
genetic templates, 165n.4
classifier, I , 4, 15, 69, 172, 1 8 1 - 1 8 3 agreement. See agreement animate, 7 1,80, l l l - 1 15, 1 15n.6, 1 19n. l l , 120 assignment, 1 1-12, 26-27, 32, 707 1 , 103-106, 1 5 1 - 1 5 2 canonical, I
prelinguistic, 162, 166-167 sublinguistic, 1 1 2, 125-126, 162, 166-167 collective nouns, See group classifier Comaltepec Chinantec, 94 competence, 12, 3 1-32, 3 1 n.49 concord, 82, 146-147, 153-155, 194-197
concord, in Thai, 146-147, 153-155
agreement type. See agreement
configurational, 1 1 1 - 1 17, 1 1 9-121,
Corbett, G.G., 34, 34n.54, I 04n.l3,
157
194, 195, 197n.l6, 198, 198n.l8
default, 99-100
count/mass, 26-29, 70, 9 1 -92, 94, 97
drop, 1 0 - 1 1 , 101-102
corpora, oral, 20, I 05, I 07, 159
grammatical category, vii, xvii,
Craig, C. See Grinevald
199-204
Cruse, D.A., 198, 198n.17
group, 67-93, 128 heterogeneous, I l l , 1 1 3, 1 1 6, 120, 127, 1 5 7 inanimate, 1 1 1- 1 1 5 mensural, 3 , 12-19, 27-29,63-66, 7 1 , 97, 1 18n.9, 155-1 56, 1 57
Dalai Lama, 133 defective noun theory, 5, 20-25
• INDEX definiteness, 25-26, 58 deixis, 128, 133n.J 0, 134, 139 DeLancey, S., 145, 147, 148, 155, 206 demonstrative, 25 detenniner, 202n.28 Denny, J.P., 20, 1 1 1-1 12, 120n. J 3 diachronic issues, 7, J29n.2, 137-139, 155-156, 156n.J4, 172-174, 206n.40 discourse studies, 9-10, 2 1 , 23, 37, 183 Downing, P., xxi, 10, 10n.20, 27, 98, 1 12-113, 1 13n.4, 1 19n.IOn.l2, 121, 122n.l8, 123, 123nn.l 9-20, 124n.2 1, 202 Dyirbal, 77
•
E•
East Asian languages, 2, 46, 7 1 , 85, 136, 160, 183, 184, 186, 1 89, 191-193, 193nn.3-4 Ejagham, 37n.60 elative case, 50-52, 205 endangered languages, 139, 159 English, 22-24, 32, 35n.56, 46, 50-55, 91 -93, 1 10, 1 2 1 -122, 127, 158, 1 59160- 1 6 1 , 167 cases, 55-58 classifiers, 13-14,57,61-62, 63-66, 67, 68, 68n. l, 71 -72, 76-81, 1 15n.7, 125n.22, 126, 159-160 185 classifier system, 65, 73-74, 75. 7681 class nouns, 141-143, 206 Old English, 42, 44n. l5, 55 panitives, 40-50, 54-63 possessive. See genitive pseudopartilives, 13-14, 32, 40-50, 52, 53-63, 177-180 Erbaugh, M., 3n.8, I I , 21, 23, 31, 31 n.48, 32, 35n.55, 106n.l5 etymology, folk, 8 1 European languages, 68, 70-7 1, 87, 93, 96, 1 1 0, I I I, 141, 160- 1 6 1 , 185, 191, 197n.l4 •
219
•
Evenki, 141
•
F•
Finnish, xviii n.3, xxii n.9, 5n.l3, 33, 39n.3, 4 1 , 42, 43, 50-53, 56, 74, 74n.l 0, 75, 80n.l6, 87-90, 89n.27, 90n.28, 95, 1 10, 158, 160-162, 188, 195n.l 0, 204n.34, 204-205 Finno-Ugric languages, 89-90, 161, 188 French, xix, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 60, 65, 65o.37, 93n.32, 107, 124, 127, 167, 192 focus, 140 fonn classes, 124-125, 127 frequency, 20-21, 98, I 06-107, 106n.l5, I J I - 1 1 2 , 1 19n.IO, 123, 159 Fukui, N., 183, 195n.8
Garo, 121, 121n.l4 gender, 105, 124-127, 136-137 categories, 124-127, 1 3 1 categorization, 159 concord, 140, 146-147, 1 53-155 covert agreement, 136-137 indeclinab1es, 1 10 languages, 158 marking, Tibetan, 136-137 pronominal, 136 relationship to classifiers, 124-127 unclassified nouns, I 07, 159 system, 98 genitive, 25-26, 46-47, 52, 54-55, 204, 204n.33 genitive-partitive. S.ee partitive-genitive. Gennan, xix, 42, 42n. 1 1 , 50, 59, 60, 96, 109, 124-125, 127, 194, 205n.37 Greek, xix, 49-50, 59, 96, 203-204 Greenberg, J., 20, 67-68, 70, 75, 80, 83, 84n.22, 97, 159, 188,200
220
•
INDEX
Grinevald, C., 68, 97-98, 128n.l, 140n. l , 153, ISS, 172n.4, 182nn.l-2,
•
classifier acquisition, 163 classi lier categories, 77, 79, 125,
184n.S, 1 85n.7, 186, 194, 194n.7,
1 1 3nn.3-4, 1 1 3-124, 1 19n. l l ,
199n.2 1 , 206n.40 Grinevald, C. and F. Seifan, xx, 125,
120n.l3, 125 classifier frequency, 20, 98, I 06-
162
107, 1 1 1 - 1 12, 1 19n. I O
group classifier, 67-93
classifier variation, I 03 diachronic issues, 7, 1 23n.l9, 137, 189 markedness, 46n.l9, 47 numerals, 123n.20
Haas, M.R., 205 historical linguistics. See diachronic issues HIa Pe, I 04, I 04n.l2 honorifics, 128-139, 149-1 SO, 1 5 0nn.8-9 Hungarian, viii, xix, 52, 75, 85-87, 89n.27, 89-90, 90n.29, 95, 1 2 1 , 126, 160-162 class nouns, 87 hypcrphoronym, 18, 30-3 1 , I 00, 1 5 7
iconicity, 1 5 8 , 166n.S, 166-167 incorporation, 23, 23n.38 Indo-European languages, 82, 95, 1 6 1 Italian, 93n.32
partitive, 46-47, 62-63 pluralization, 93n.3 1 pronouns, 124n.21 pscudopartitive, 8n.18, 46n.l9, 47, 59, 62-63 repeaters, lOOn. 7, 100-10 I specification, 23n.38 Japanese-Koguryoic languages, I 5 I , 188 Jespersen, 0., 38, 40n.6 Joosten, F., 26n.40, 34
Khmer, 99, ISOn.IO, 159-160 Kilivila, xix, 2, 95, I 00, 1 83, 196, 196n.l3, 20 I n.26 kinesthetic image schema, 78, 128, 132135 Kiparsky, P., 20Sn.34 Koguryo, 123n.l9 Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M., 4 l n.7, 42n.l l ,
Jacaltec, xxiii, 2, 98, 124 Jackendoff, R., xviii n.4, 38, 40, 43-44, 44n. J6, 4 7-48, 48n.2 1 , 49, 53, 56,
5 1 -52, 204n.34 Korean, 19n.3 I , 1 37n.l6, 187n.l 0 Kruisinga, E., 201, 202n.27
S6n.28, I 98n. l 8 Japanese, xix, xxii, xxiv, 2, Sn.l 3, 7, 9, 13, 17n.29, 22, 23n.38, 24, 7 1 , 98, 100, 106, I 10, 1 12-120, 122-123, 1 4 1 , 158, 160-161, 182, 183, 187189, 199,202,205, 206 agreement, 19Sn.8 anaphora, I 0, I On.20, I I 2-I 23, 123n.20
Lahu, 67 Latin, 33,96, 127, 140, 188, 194, 195n.IO
•
INDEX
Lehman, F.K., xx, 12, 28, 68, 96, 194, 200n.24 Lehrer, A., xviii n.4, xxv, 63, 63n.34, 68 Lyons, J., 2-3, 5, 1 7, 20, 38, 95, 1 2 1 , 121n.14, 141n.2, 201
Malinowski, B., 4, 182, 20 I n.26 Mandarin Chinese, ix, xxii, xxv, 1-3, 56-66, 91-93,98, 106, 1 10, 122, 125, 127, 135-1 36, 141, 158, 161, 182, 185, 1 86, 1 89,206 anaphora, 9-1 0 automeasures, I 69-172 classifier categories, 12-14, 34-36 classifier constraints, 4-9, 23 classifier frequency, 20 classifier variation, I I -12, 3 1 n.49, 31-32 definiteness, 20-26 dialects, 35 n.55 loanwords, 135n.l2-13, 137 number agreement, 72-73 partitive, 43, 45-46, 53-54 plural suffix, 175-I 76 pseudopanitive, 6-37, 39, 45-46, 53-54,68 quasiphoronyms, 172-I 74 specification, 20-25, 32-34 markedness, I 59 Matisoff, J., 67 Maya, Chontal, 27 measure. See mensural classifier measure term. See mensural classifier 'measure word'. See mensural classifier metaphor, 203 metaphorical extension, 77-78 Mokilesc, I 07 Mongolian, xxii n.9, 69n.3, I 4 I, 162 morpheme, I 92-194 declensional, 127 portmanteau, I, 34, 124-127, 128 morphological type, 127 morphology, 1 92-194
221
•
neuroscience, I 63-I 66 noun constituent in a pseudopartitivc, 36, 39, 170- 171 count, 5, 15, 26-27, 32-34 compound, 129-13 1 , 140-141 defective, theory. See defective noun theory mass, I 5, 17-I 8, 26-27, 3 2-34 unclassifiable, 99 unclassified, 20-25, I 07 noun class. See categorization, noun noun classification. See categorization, noun number, 32-34, 69-70, 79-81, 99, I 58, 160-161, 175-176, 197n.l4, 197-199, 200 marker, 32-34, 39n.3 numeral, 36, 36n.58, I 23n.20, 1 37n.l7, 137-139, 202 decade class marker, 139 drop, 10-11, 139 mathematical use, 36, 139 numerative, 20 I, 20 I n.27. See phoronym Nung, 36n.59, 107, 107n.J6
Old Koguryo. See Koguryo
part of speech. See category, grammatical partitive, 43-50, 57, 204-205 case, 4 1 , 43, 58, 74, 74n. I 0, 204205 complex partitive, 59-63 constituents of, 39n.4 constraint, 44
222
•
INDEX
•
construction, 34, 40-42 marker of, 4 1 -42, 44 semantics of, 43-44, I 58 partitive-genitive, 4 1 , 43-46, 54-SS, 57-
58 phoronym, 36, 39, 65-66, 69, 99, I 57-
158, 1 64-165, 1 8 1 -183, 199-204 definition, 203-204 grammatical category, vii, xvii, 14,
19, 39n.4, 199-204 linguistic universal status, I 55-1 56,
158 non-phoronyms, 169-174 phrase. See pseudopartitive semanti.cs, 65-66, 79, I 58
Ramal, P., 191n.l register, honorific, 128-129, 132-134 repeater,4, 100-102, 123n.l8, 157 partial, I 0 I semantographic, I 00n.7 RijkhofT, J., 2, 20n.33, 22, 67 Russian, xix, 5, Sn. l l , Sn.l3, 19, 33, 39n.3, 42, 43, 45, 68, 7 1 , 75, 79, 8183, 83nn.20-21 , 84nn.22-24, 84-85, 87, 93, 95, 96, 1 10, 126, 126n.24, 127, 140, 160-162, 194, 195n.IO, 196, 198
subtypes, 157-158, 199-201 pidgins, 166n.S, 166-167, 167n.6 plural markers, 160-161, 175-176, 197-
199 possessive classification,
Sanskrit, 188
portmanteau morpheme, 96-98, 1 27
Sapir, E., 187
pronouns, 124n.21, 136, 176
Schlegel, F. von, 188
Proto-Tai, I S S
Selkirk, E., xvii, xviii n.4, 38, 38n. l , 40,
prototype theory, 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 pseudopartitive, 5, 36-37, 38-50, 158,
177-180, 199-204 case, 4 1 , SO, SS-58 complex pseudopartitive, 59-63 expansion, I I , I 5-17 function term. See phoronym
4 1 n. 9, 41-44, 47-48, 48n.21 , 49-50 Senft,. G., xx, 4, Sn.l2, 13, 20, 28,
196n.l3, 201 semantics, 69 formal, Shibatani, M. and T. Bynon, xvii n.2,
188n.l2
morphology, S0-55
Southeast Asian languages, 2, 46, 136,
semantics, 66, I 58
137n.l6, 160, 182, 184, 186-187, 1 89, 1 9 1 - 1 93, 193nn.3-4 specifier, 39, 39n.3, 197n.l 5, 203 Stavrou, M. 49, 53n.25 Stickney, H., 53 Swahili, xxiii, 196 Sweet, H., xxv n. l l , 401!.6 syllable, 189, 193, 193nn.3-4
term, 66, 204-205 pseudopartitive construction, See pseudopartitive
Qiang, 138n.l9
syntax. See partitive and !J>Seudopartitive
qualifier term,
quantifier, 4, 1 8-19, 25, 99, 202n. 28, 202-203 quasiphoronym, 1 72-174
Tai, J_ and L. Wang, 68, 75 Tai languages, 107, 155, 161
•
INDEX
Tariana,98 taxonomy, 1 1 1 - 1 27 of classifier classes, 120n.13 ofclass term classes, 141-146 terminology, xvii-xviii, 191-206 Thai, xix, xxii, xxv, 2, 3, 7n.l6, 9, 13, 89,95, 100, 1 0 1 , 106, 1 10, 125-126, 129, 132, 134, 137n.16, 140-148, 148n.7, 149-156, 159-162, 183, 186, 1 89, 193n.4, 205, 206 agreement, 132, 134, 146-156 anaphora, I 01-102 class nouns, 134, 137, 143-146, 147n.6, 147-152,206 classifier drop, 101-102, 1 4 1 n.3 concord, 134, 146-147, 153-155 indefinite word order, I On.22 loanwords, I 55 repeaters, 1 7n.29, 101-102 Tibetan, viii, xxii, 87, 128-129, 129nn.24, 130nn.5-6. 130-133, 133n.9, 134135, 135nn. 12-14, 139, 161, 193n.4, 205,206 class nouns, 128-139,206 classifier-like categories of, 134, 136n.15 evidentials, 133n.8 gender, 136-137, 138n.l9 honorifics, 128-129, 132, 133n.IO, 133-136 kinesthetic image schemas, 128, 135-136, 136n.l5 numerals, t 37n.l7, 139 pronouns, I 08 pseudopartitive constructions, 13 8 syntax, 130-131, 1 3 1 n.7 verbal agreement, 133n.8 Tibeto-Burman languages, 121 n.l4, 138, 138n.l9, 139, 1 6 1 T'sou, 8., 68 Turkic languages, 75, 99, 161, 188, 192 Turkish, 59-60, 79, 99, 161, 188 typology, 181-189 fonnal, xvii-xviii, 38-39 functional, xvii-xviii, 38-39 holistic, 181n.1, 1 8 1 -182, 186-189
223
•
morphological, 161-162 Tzeltal, xvii, xix, 2, 95, 106-t07
Universal Grammar, 166-167 universal, linguistic, vii-viii, xx, xxii, 39n.5 Uralic languages, 75, 87, 161, 192 See Finno-Ugric languages Uzbek, xix, 10, 14n.26, 18, 3 1 , 59, 69, 75, 79, 87, 90-9 1, 97, 99, 160-162, J87n.l0, 188
•
V•
verbal classification, Vietnamese, xix, 7n.J6, 10, 53n.25, 99, 106, 107, 141, 159-160, 187, 193n.4
•
Z•
Zwicky, A.M., 192-193
B E R K E L E Y I N S I G H T S I N L I N G U I STICS AND SEM IOTICS Irmengard Rauch General Edi tor
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