Classifier syntax in Vietnamese
Andrew Simpson
1
·
Binh Ngo
1
Received: 20 March 2015 / Accepted: 16 March 2018 / Published online: 6 June 2018
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Vietnamese is a language with a three-way split in the appearance of
numeral classifiers when nouns are counted: some nouns always require classifiers
(obligatory-classifier nouns), others occur only optionally with classifiers (optional-
classifier nouns), and a third group never combines with a classifier (non-classified
nouns). This distribution provides potentially important information on the much
debated question of whether classifiers functionally combine with numerals (Bale
and Coon in Linguist Inq 45:695–707, 2014) or with nouns (Li in Linguist Inq 29
(4):693–702, 1998; Cheng and Sybesma in Linguist Inq 30:509–542, 1999). It also
appears to challenge Chierchia’s (Nat Lang Semant 6(4):339–405, 1998) charac-
terization of the basic semantic type of nouns found in different languages, which
assumes a uniform pattern of classifier occurrence in numeral classifier languages.
Having described the broad distribution of classifiers in Vietnamese and the ques-
tions this raises, the article probes the syntactic properties of classifiers with the
three types of noun in the language, considering double classifier patterns, fragment
answers, passive constructions, and the use of classifiers with certain compound
nouns. Evidence from such phenomena is shown to support the hypothesis that a
uniform syntactic structure is actually projected with nouns of all types in Viet-
namese, but sometimes masked by the use of nouns to overtly lexicalize both the N
and CL positions in nominal projections through N-to-Cl movement.
Keywords Numeral classifiers · Typology of nouns · Vietnamese
& Andrew Simpson
andrew.simpson@usc.edu
Binh Ngo
binhnngo@usc.edu
1
Department of Linguistics, GFS 301, University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
CA 90089-1693, USA
123
J East Asian Linguist (2018) 27:211–246
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-018-9181-5
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