Interconnection between the Chinese Nominal Classifiers and Nouns

Authors

  • Ni Maohua Facultad de Estudios de Europa y Latinoamerica Universidad de Estudios Internacionales de Shanghai Shanghai, China 200083

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18002/sin.v19i2.8601

Keywords:

nominal classifier; cognitive linguistics; teaching Chinese as a foreign language; Spanish.

Abstract

According to the perspective of the linguistics typology, Chinese is one of the languages with classifiers system while Spanish is not. This is one of the factors that make the Spanish-speaking students feel difficult to handle the collocations of Chinese classifiers and the nouns they measure or quantify. What confuses learners most exists in the mutual selection motivations between classifiers and nouns. In these seemingly arbitrary motivations, cognitive mechanisms that reflect the way of feeling and expressing the real world with a linguistic system does work. With the analysis of the cognitive models of the syntactic structure of the classifier, this paper studies the interconnecting relationships between nominal classifiers and nouns of Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, in order to help the Spanish-speaking students to understand and manage the uses of the nominal classifiers.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Métricas alternativas

References

Aikhenvald, A. Y., 2000. Classifiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Allan, K., 1977. Classifiers. Language 53: 285-311.

Berlin, B. & Paul, K., 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bisang, W., 1999. Classifiers in East and Southeast Asian Languages: Counting and Beyond. Changes in Numeral Systems. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 113-185.

Bosque, I., 1989. Las categorías gramaticales. Relaciones y diferencias. Madrid: Síntesis.

Craig, C. (ed.), 1986. Noun Classes and Categorization. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

Craig, C., 1994. Classifier Languages. In R. E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 565-569.

Craig, C. G., 2000. A Morphosyntactic Typology of Classifiers. In Gunter Senft (ed.) Systems of Nominal Classification. Language, Culture and Cognition 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50-92.

Cuenca, M. J. & Joseph, H., 1999. Introducción a la lingϋística cognitiva. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999.

Demonte, V., 1980. Partitives and the Internal Structure of NP Specifiers, Cahiers Linguistiques d’ Ottawa 9: 51-71.

Ellis, R., 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

García-Miguel, José Mª, 2000. Clasificación nominal, concordancia y pronombres. Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante (ELUA) 14: 93-116.

Kleiber, G., 1995, La semántica de los prototipos: Categoría y sentido léxico. Trad. de Antonio Rodríguez Rodríguez. Madrid: Visor.

Kövecses, Z. & Günter, R., 1998. Metonymy: developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics, 9: 37-77.

Lakoff, G. & Mark J., 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G., 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, R., 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford (Cal.): Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R., 1990. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlín: Mouton de Gruyter.

Loke, Kit-Ken, 1997. The Grammaticalisation and Regrammaticalization of Chinese Numeral Classifier Morphemes. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 25 (1): 1-20.

Lu, J., 2015. Cuatro categorías de contraste morfológico entre chino y español, Actas del VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Asiática de Hispanistas. Beijing, Ed. Enseñanza e Investigación de Lenguas Extranjeras.

Martínez, J. A., 1999. La concordancia, en I. Bosque y V. Demonte (eds.): Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (vol. 2 cap. 42). Madrid: Real Academia Española/Espasa, 2695-2784.

Martínez, Marco, C., 2019. The "classifier” Category in Mandarin Chinese and Other Languages. Sinologia Hispanica, China Studies Review. 9, (2): 31-56.

Reddy, M. J., 1979. The conduit metaphor--a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 284-297.

Rosch, E. y Carolyn, B. M., 1975. Family resemblances: studies in the internal structures of categorization. Cognitive Psychology 7: 573-605.

Rosch, E., 1978. Principies of Categorization. In E. Rosch & B. Lloyd (eds.) Cognition and Categorization. Hilldale: Laurence Erlbaum Ass, 27-48.

Senft, G., 2000. What Do we Really Know about the Nominal Classification Systems. In Gunter Senft (ed.) Systems of Nominal Classification. Language, Culture and Cognition 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11-49.

Tai, J. H-Y & Wang, L., 1990. A Semantic Study of the Classifier Tiao. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 25 (1): 35-36.

Tai, J. H-Y & Chao, F., 1994. A Semantic Study of the Classifier Zhang. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 29 (3): 67-78.

Ts’ou, Benjamin K., 1976. The Structure of Nominal Classifier Systems. Oceanic Linguistics Special publication No. 13, Austroasiatic Studies II, University of Hawai’i Press, 1215-1247.

Ungerer, F. & Hans-Jörg S., 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London: Longman.

Wittgenstein, L., 1989. Philosophical Investigations (1953). Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Downloads

Published

2025-01-17 — Updated on 2026-01-22

Versions

How to Cite

Maohua, N. (2026). Interconnection between the Chinese Nominal Classifiers and Nouns. Sinología hispánica. China Studies Review, 19(2), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.18002/sin.v19i2.8601 (Original work published January 17, 2025)

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 2 (2024)

Section

Artículos

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

 Sinología Hispánica. China Studies Review considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:

  • The authors assign the exploitation rights (reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation) of the work accepted for publication to the University of León on a non-exclusive basis. Authors can establish, on their own, additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (for example, placing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), always acknowledging the initial publication. in this magazine.

  • The manuscript is your own original work and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work.

  • The manuscript is not currently under consideration or peer review, nor accepted for publication, nor in press, nor published elsewhere.

  • The manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libellous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal.

  • Please note that Sinologia Hispanica uses Turnitin software to screen manuscripts for unoriginal material. By submitting your manuscript to Sinologia Hispanica you are agreeing to any necessary originality checks your manuscript may have to undergo during the peer-review and production processes. Any author who fails to adhere to the above conditions will be rejected.

  • Authors are allowed and encouraged to electronically disseminate the pre-printed versions (version before being evaluated) and / or post-printing (version evaluated and accepted for publication) of their works before publication, since it favors their circulation and dissemination more early and with it, a possible increase in its citation and reach among the academic community.

Sinologia Hispanica is under an international license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0. You can read more about this license in an informative version and legal text.