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Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language pp 647–698Cite as

Taiwan Mandarin Quantifiers

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Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 90))

Abstract

This chapter illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chapter 1. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Taiwan Mandarin, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We would like to thank Edward Keenan, Denis Paperno, and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions and three consultants who provided judgments for some of the examples. All consultants and the first author are native speakers of Mandarin of around 30 years in age; they were born and raised in Taiwan and also speak some Taiwanese. Thus, we restrict the scope of our description to Taiwan Mandarin to recognize that significant dialectal variation may be present in Mandarin quantification.

  2. 2.

    We follow the convention in the syntactic/semantic literature of not marking lexical tone and guiding the segmentation of Mandarin words by the morphemic segmentation in the English gloss rather than segmenting syllable by syllable. In some cases, we do provide a finer segmentation when we want to draw attention to morphological composition, such as in the first mention of a quantifier or in the discussion of numerals in Section 12.1.1.1. A list of abbreviations used in the chapter for glossing, with rough descriptions of meanings, follows:

    • ASP aspect marker, gloss for guo (experiential), le (perfective), and zhe (durative)

    • BA Mandarin object marker

    • BEI Mandarin passive marker

    • COMP comparative

    • CL classifier (Section 12.1.6)

    • DOU Mandarin quantifier (very roughly, ‘all’, but see Section 12.1.3)

    • GE Mandarin distributive quantifier (Section 12.1.4)

    • DE Mandarin possessive marker or nominalizer

    • LOC locative

    • NEG negation, gloss for bu and mei(you) (Section 12.1.1.3)

    • Q question particle

    • YOU Mandarin existential verb (roughly ‘have’, but see Section 12.1.1.3)

    Throughout the chapter, we use the traditional term NP to descriptively refer to nominal expressions; some theoretical frameworks would refer to some of these expressions as DPs.

  3. 3.

    Because ci is a unit of time, it can be considered a classifier; thus we could also choose the gloss liang-ci ‘two-CL’. But to emphasize the use of n-ci as an A-Quantifier, for some natural number n, we choose to gloss ci as ‘time’, e.g. ‘two-time’ here.

  4. 4.

    In the cases of generalized universal quantification, e.g. ‘all but …’, the addition of dou seems to either pick out a specific set for quantification (28-d) or act as an intensifier (28-e). See also discussion of dou as a quantifier at the end of Section 12.1.3.

  5. 5.

    We thank an anonymous reviewer for noting this.

  6. 6.

    In both (48) and (49), it is also possible to not topicalize the object.

  7. 7.

    The word ren ‘person’ is an exception and may occur in determiner expressions without classifiers, e.g. liu ren ‘six people’, mei ren ‘every person’.

  8. 8.

    Li and Thompson (1981) suggest that numeral classifiers are obligatory only for some quantifiers, e.g. zheng ‘whole, entire’, ji ‘how many, a few’, mei ‘every’, and mou-yi ‘a certain’.

  9. 9.

    The postverbal de in (72-b) is a different morpheme than the de used with nominals.

  10. 10.

    English ‘some’ as in (98) does not have a direct correspondent in Mandarin; the closest expression is you yi-ge ‘YOU one-CL’ or mo-ge ‘certain-CL’.

  11. 11.

    While all the floating quantifier examples given here were accepted by our consultants, the reviewer notes to us, possibly referring to a different dialect of Mandarin, that (126-b) is grammatical only under a pragmatic context of contrast indicated in a following sentence (other students did not laugh loudly), (129-b) is grammatical only with a prosodic break after the object laoshi and (128-b) and (131-b) are ungrammatical.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Grace C.-H. Kuo & Kristine M. Yu

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Kristine M. Yu

  3. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Kristine M. Yu

Authors
  1. Grace C.-H. Kuo
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  2. Kristine M. Yu
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Correspondence to Grace C.-H. Kuo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Dept. of Linguistics, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue 405, Los Angeles, 90095-1543, California, USA

    Edward L. Keenan

  2. , Dept. of Linguistics, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue 405, Los Angeles, 90095-1543, California, USA

    Denis Paperno

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Kuo, G.CH., Yu, K.M. (2012). Taiwan Mandarin Quantifiers. In: Keenan, E., Paperno, D. (eds) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 90. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_12

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