Non-Quantifiable Nouns in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Addressing non-quantifiable nouns is an indispensable step to figure out numeral classifiers and (bare) nouns in Mandarin Chinese. Recognizing the dearth of studies on Mandarin non-quantifiable nouns, we initiate the work by discussing their denominations and definitions from a syntactic-semantic perspective. Subsequently, offering a huge and systematic set of linguistic examples, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of six typical types of non-quantifiable nouns: proper nouns, relative existence-denoting nouns, counting/measuring-denoting nouns, common nouns with uniqueness, nouns with morphemes in special relation, and idiomatic nouns. Based on the above analysis, we propose three fundamental semantic features of being a non-quantifiable noun, i.e. uniqueness, relativity, and counting/measuring-denoting feature, among which, the last two features can be attributed to the first one, that is, uniqueness. Furthermore, we divide uniqueness into absolute one and relative one based on whether the referents of non-quantifiable nouns are independent of contexts, and into external one and internal one based on where these referents are quantified.