Abstract
Chinese complex numerals have two types of structures: atom-base structure and round-remainder structure. This paper studies on the structural and semantic relationship between them. We hold that the former is either parallel to or consisted by the latter. Together with atoms and bases, they form the structure hierarchy of Chinese numeral system. The semantic relationship between constituents in atom-base structures is multiplication whose expression is word order, and that in round-remainder structures is addition and it can be expressed as word order or words. While the Chinese example Greenberg (1978) gives is wrong, order does function as a morpheme indicating semantic relationship and there are nine pairs of such Chinese cardinal numerals.
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Liu, P. (2013). Internal Structure Types and Semantic Relation Types of Chinese Complex Cardinal Numerals. In: Liu, P., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8229. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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