中国語動量詞が数えるイベントの集合と個体

Abstract

In modern Chinese, when enumerating events, the numeral does not appear in isolation, activity classifiers such as ‘quan2’ ‘ci4’ ‘dun4’ occur with a numeral as a ‘numeral-classifier’ expression. In Chinese Traditional Grammar (Liu et al. 1983, Zhou 2012 etc.), the activity classifiers are classified as dedicated activity classifiers (i.e. used only as activity classifiers) and temporary activity classifiers (i.e. borrowed from nouns and become activity classifiers temporarily). However, the difference between them is not yet clear. In this paper, I aim to cognitively examine the use of the activity classifiers when enumerating events and explain this through a cognitive experiment. I will show that depending on the focus, there are three types of activity classifiers which enumerate events: those co-occurring with collective reading events (‘dun4’ ‘fan1’ etc.), those co-occurring with individual reading events (‘quan2’ ‘yan3’ etc.), and those co-occurring with both types of reading events (‘ci4’ ‘hui2’). It has long been known that nouns share a lattice structure of individual, sum and group, but the consideration of Chinese activity classifiers shows that events may also be hierarchically structured.