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On the Semantics of Suffix -men and NP-men in Mandarin Chinese

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11831))

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Abstract

The paper deals with the semantics of the nominal suffix -men and NP-men in Mandarin Chinese. In sinologist linguistics, -men is often considered as a “marker of collectivity”. However, the term collectivity (jíhé in Chinese) is confusing. In semantics, the concept of collectivity refers to two things, collective interpretation of a NP and collective nouns. This distinction can help to clarify the usage of -men. The author argues that the suffix -men is a marker of plurality, with [plural] feature due to its denotation. It indicates the number of a NP. In this paper, -men will be analyzed with respect to the collective and distributive interpretations of NP-men, especially when it co-occurs with different types of predicates.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Abbreviations: Acc: Accomplished aspect; Cl: individual classifier; Clcollective: collective classifier; Clcontainer: container classifier; Clgroup: group classifier; DE: relater de (的); Pl: plural.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yan Li

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  1. Yan Li
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Correspondence to Yan Li .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

    Yangsen Zhang

  3. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

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Li, Y. (2020). On the Semantics of Suffix -men and NP-men in Mandarin Chinese. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_79

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_79

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38188-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38189-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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