Referentiality and thematic importance: The discourse functions of Zauzou classifiers

Abstract

Marking referentiality is one of the major discourse functions of numeral classifiers in Mainland Southeast Asian languages. However, the reference types of classified and unclassified noun phrases exhibit some extent of fluidity. This paper presents the discourse functions of classified and unclassified noun phrases in Zauzou, a less-studied Tibeto-Burman language in China. Zauzou noun phrases in spontaneous speech indicate no simple correspondence between the presence/absence of a classifier and any fixed referential values (i.e., (in)definiteness and specificity). Findings of both qualitative and quantitative studies only point to a tendency of using classifier phrases to express individualized references and bare nouns for unindividualized references. The fluidity in the reference type of classified and unclassified noun phrases can be largely explained by the split in definiteness and thematic importance of a referent in discourse. Notably, thematic importance plays a secondary role in determining the form of a noun phrase in addition to referentiality. Thematically unimportant individualized referents have a higher chance to be expressed by a bare noun. This study provides a new piece of empirical evidence for the patterns of semantic-pragmatic interaction in manipulating the use of numeral classifiers as well as the typology of definiteness marking.