| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 107 === Sortal classifier is one of the major syntactic categories in Sinitic languages. However, there is no consensus on the origin of Chinese classifiers. It has been argued that Chinese sortal classifiers originated from Tai-Kadai in Southeast Asia, one of the reasons being that there are more sortal classifiers in the southern varieties of Sinitic languages than in northern Chinese (e.g. Peyraube 1991 among others). On the other hand, Her & Li (to appear), among others, argue that Chinese developed sortal classifiers indigenously, while language contact in the north with Altaic languages caused the decrease in the number of sortal classifiers in northern Chinese.
To verify the latter hypothesis, we collected and compared sortal classifiers in northern Chinese from two time periods: the period from Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties, where the category of sortal classifier was firmly established, and Yuan Dynasty, an Altaic regime. The results show that there are about 20 more sortal classifiers in Yuan, even though the rulers’ language, i.e., Mongolian, is a non-classifier language.
However, contemporarily southern Chinese languages have more sortal classifiers than northern Chinese (Hashimoto 1985, Yue 2003). Taking this fact and our results together, we propose the following hypothesis. The classifier system in Northern Chinese had developed quite maturely in Wei Jin and continued to grow well into the Yuan Dynasty, and the effect of Altaicization in terms of the decrease of sortal classifiers did not occur until the 300-year rule of the Qing Dynasty. However, we leave this hypothesis and other possible reasons why sortal classifiers in northern Chinese decreased to future research.
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