The World's Countability

Abstract

Academic discussions of the count/mass distinction in Chinese feature three general problems, upon which this essay critically reflects: 1) Most studies focus either on modern or on classical Chinese, thus representing parallel discussions that never intersect; 2) studies on count/mass grammar are often detached from reflections on count/mass semantics, which results in serious theoretical and terminological flaws; 3) approaches to Chinese often crucially depend on observations of English grammar and semantics, as, e.g., many/much vs. few/little patterns, the use of plural inflections, etc., which is seldom justified. This article investigates the relevant discourse on the count/mass issue in classical and modern Chinese and concludes with exploring two distinct areas related to countability: the semantics of singular in contexts in which objects are introduced as referential-indefinite and the semantics of number and countability as revealed in diangu.

關於中文中的可數名詞與物質名詞區分的學術研究，通常表現以下三個嚴重問題：1) 大多數的調查分别分析古代中文或者現代中文，而没有綜合性的、既討論古代也考慮現代中文的分析；2) 由於可數、物質名詞語法研究者經常不考慮到語義學方面的問題，這導致很多術語上及理論上的嚴重缺陷；3) 在描寫中文中的可數、物質名詞時，很多學者強調英語語法的重要性，如 many/much 跟 few/little 的對立、復數名詞詞尾、不定冠詞的使用等等。本文集中考慮有關古代中文及現代中文中的可數、物質名詞的論述。文章收尾的部分調查指稱不定指事物的單數形式的語義學及典故中的光桿名詞的可數性問題。

Keywords:

• count/mass semantics
• diangu
• division of reference
• bare nouns
• referential indefiniteness
• individuality
• language and ontology
• mass noun hypothesis

關鍵詞:

• 可數性
• 物質性
• 典故、分割的指涉
• 古代
• 現代中文的語法及語義學
• 光桿名詞
• 指稱不定指的事物
• 個性、語言與本體論、物質名詞假設

Notes

1 Yang Xiaomei 2011, p. 159.

2 Hansen 1983, p. 35.

3 Hansen 1983, p. 37.

4 “Divided Reference,” in Quine 1960, pp. 90–95.

5 Quine 1960, p. 91.

6 Yang Xiaomei 2011, p. 158.

7 Yang Xiaomei 2011, p. 161: “The claim that count nouns in classical Chinese behave as mass nouns do leads to the denial of the Chinese babies’ ability of abstraction in learning language.”

8 Quine 1960, p. 92.

9 For the psychological motivation of the count/mass distinction, among other things, the significance of differentiating between physical objects and masses in the process of language learning, see Soja – Carey – Spelke 1991 and Fei Xu 1997.

10 Imai – Gentner 1997, pp. 188–189.

11 Cf. the study on the universality of the principles of categorization by Rosch – Mervis et al. 1976. On the count-mass distinction as reflecting fundamental basic cognitive processes, see Wisniewski – Lamb – Middleton 2003.

12 Imai – Gentner 1997, pp. 191–192.

13 Yan Yunxiang 2000, p. 27.

14 Liu 1996, pp. 21, 27.

15 Brindley 2010, p. x.

16 Hansen concludes his essay with the following programmatic words: “[W]e may justifiably generalize that there is no individualism in Chinese philosophy” (Hansen 1985, p. 54).

17 Brindley 2010, p. xviii.

18 Hansen 1985, p. 41.

19 Brindley’s monograph has received much scholarly attention and it is all the more surprising that the numerous reviews of it make no mention of the count/mass controversy. Cf. Loy Hui-Chieh 2011, Fischer 2012, Holloway 2012, and Sarkissian 2012.

20 Quine 1960, pp. 51–52.

21 Hansen 1983, p. 141.

22 Hansen 1983, p. 31.

23 Hansen 1983, p. 32.

24 Hansen 1983, p. 33.

25 Cf. the way he introduces grammatical features of English mass nouns to elucidate the mass noun semantics in Chinese: “The ordinary world of Western common sense is a collection of particulars or individual objects. Water, gold, grass, wood, furniture, and beef are English mass nouns. We measure them rather than count them […]. Grammatically they resist pluralization and direct numbering. We modify them using much and little instead of many and few” (Hansen 1992, p. 47). Cf. Hansen 1985, p. 41.

26 Robins 2000, p. 148.

27 Robins 2000, p. 149.

28 Robins 2000, p. 151.

29 Robins 2000, p. 149.

30 Robins 2000, p. 154.

31 Robins 2000, p. 157.

32 Robins 2000, pp. 172f.

33 For more details concerning the semantics of bare nouns in Chinese, see Part IV of the present study.

34 Tillemans 2016, p. 35.

35 Ma – van Brakel 2016, p. 147: “According to Robins, all classical Chinese nouns function most commonly as mass nouns”; p. 338: “If a noun (and its context) divides its reference, it is a count noun on that occasion.”

36 Fraser 2007, p. 420.

37 Fraser 2007, p. 424.

38 Note that in English, “people” is a special form of plural reserved for humans, cf. similar count noun plural forms in German (Leute), French (les gens), Russian (люди). In contrast, “la gente” (people) in Italian is a mass noun used only in the singular: Unlike the Chinese ren (man/people), it does not – and cannot – divide its reference.

39 Fraser 2007, p. 427.

40 Fraser 2007, pp. 424f.

41 Cf. Fraser 2007, p. 428: “[T]he mere fact that a noun functions as a mass noun has no consequences whatsoever for how we conceive of the things referred to by that noun.”

42 Generic nouns (e.g., min 民, “people”) are introduced as follows: “Unlike count nouns, generic nouns are never modified by shu 数 ‘a number of’. Like count nouns, but unlike mass nouns, generic nouns can be modified by qun 群 ‘the whole flock/crowd/lot of’, zhu 诸 ‘the various’, zhong 众 ‘all the many’ etc.” (Harbsmeier 1991, p. 55).

43 Harbsmeier 1991, p. 58.

44 Harbsmeier 1991, p. 51.

45 Harbsmeier 1991, p. 52.

46 Harbsmeier 1991, p. 52.

47 Hansen 1992, p. 48.

48 Fraser 2007, p. 436.

49 Cf. Hansen 1983, p. 33.

50 Scholars discussing Chinese clearly overestimate the theoretical value of some patterns of English grammar, e.g., that of “many/much.” They often ignore that the corresponding patterns are missing not only in Chinese, but also in a number of Indo-European languages. Consider, e.g., “veel water” (much water) vs. “veel mensen” (many people), “weinig water” (little water) vs. “weinig mensen” (few people) in Dutch; “много воды“ (much water) vs. “много людей“ (many people) in Russian, “beaucoup d’eau” (much water) vs. “beaucoup de gens” (many people) in French, etc. That no formal difference is made here between count and mass nouns cannot be interpreted as in any way suggestive of the semantics in, e.g., Chinese. Yet they are important for studies of countability in Dutch, Russian, and French as evidence against the universal validity of the “many/much” pattern.

51 Harbsmeier 1998, p. 318.

52 Robins 2000, p. 157.

53 Harbsmeier 1991, p. 51.

54 Robins 2000, p. 162: “[T]his distinction is not important.”

55 Robins 2000, p. 163.

56 Robins 2000, p. 163.

57 Lowe 2015, p. 55.

58 Pelletier 1975, p. 456.

59 Cf. Anna Wierzbicka’s 1985 influential essay on this subject.

60 Pelletier 2012, pp. 9–26.

61 Pelletier 1975, pp. 23f.

62 Pelletier 1975, p. 17.

63 The following words by William Boltz 1985, p. 309 may serve as a typical example of discussing the mass noun hypothesis for modern Chinese as something self-evident: “The Mass Noun Hypothesis is in itself neither especially novel nor particularly controversial; it has long been recognized as valid for modern Chinese.” Among studies which rest on observations of the strange behavior of Chinese nouns are those provided by Niina Zhang and Susan Rothstein. Both follow the same argumentation: “[I]t is undeniable that no noun in Chinese may combine with a numeral directly in a numeral expression. […] Therefore, all nouns in the language have the feature [-Numerable]. This means that no noun in the language is a count noun” (Zhang 2013, p. 29). Cf. Rothstein 2010, p. 348: “Some languages, such as Chinese, have only nouns that behave as mass expressions,” and Rothstein 2017, p. 89: “In Mandarin Chinese, all nouns show the grammatical properties of mass nouns, and none can be directly counted. As illustrated in: ‘liang ge pingguo’ (‘two CL apple – two apples.’).”

64 Lin – Schaeffer 2018.

65 Lin – Schaeffer 2018, p. 3.

66 Lin – Schaeffer 2018, p. 20.

67 Cheng – Sybesma 1998; Cheng – Sybesma 1999.

68 Cheng – Sybesma 1999, p. 516.

69 Cheng – Sybesma 1998, p. 403.

70 Cheng – Sybesma 1998, p. 387; Cheng – Sybesma 1999, p. 515.

71 Cheng – Doetjes – Sybesma 2008, p. 61: “In particular the claim that in Mandarin or, more generally, Chinese, nouns are only individuated when a classifier is present is wrong.”

72 Lin – Schaeffer 2018, p. 20.

73 Borer 2005, p. 99.

74 Borer 2005, p. 93.

75 Borer 2005, p. 88.

76 Sharvy 1978, p. 362.

77 Sharvy 1978, p. 355.

78 Chierchia 1998b, p. 354.

79 Chierchia 1998a, p. 93.

80 Hansen 1983, p. 35.

81 Chierchia 2010, p. 107.

82 Chierchia 2010, p. 107.

83 Guder 2005, p. 268.

84 Quine 1960, p. 91.

85 Hansen 1983, p. 32.

86 Borer 2005, p. 93.

87 Lin – Schaeffer 2018, p. 2: “Nouns are both mass and count: evidence from unclassified nouns in adult and child Mandarin Chinese.”

88 Zhao Yuanren 1970, pp. 585-588. In this passage I have adopted the Pinyin transcription for Chinese characters.

89 Mou Bo 1999, p. 53.

90 Willman 2018.

91 Jespersen 1992 [1924], pp. 113–114.

92 Perlmutter 1970.

93 E.g., Birkenmaier 1976, Gorishneva 2016.

94 Givón 1981, p. 48.

95 Givón 1981, p. 52.

96 Carroll 1965, pp. 46–47.

97 Zhao Yuanren 1988 [1921], p. 51.

98 Chen Fu’an 1981, p. 59.

99 Ma Teng 2016, p. 36.

100 Guan – Zhao 1981, p. 35.

101 Zhu Haoyi 2016, p. 57.

102 Zhu Hongguo 1987, p. 42.

103 Tada Kōzō 1975, p. 54.

104 Shōno Kōkichi 1971, p. 64.

105 Seriu Hajime 1979, p. 80.

106 Ishii Mutsumi 2008, p. 33.

107 Waki Akiko 1998, p. 57.

108 Consider some further illustrations: Carroll 1965, p. 11: “The Rabbit took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket.” (Zhao Yuanren 1988 [1921], p. 5: 兔子当真在它背心袋里摸出一只代表 (yi zhi daibiao – one watch); Carroll 1965, p. 13: “She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed.” (Zhao Yuanren 1988 [1921], p. 7: 她经过一个架子的时候就伸手把一个小瓶子拿了出来 (yi ge xiao pingzi – one small bottle); Carroll 1965, p. 24: “I’ll stay down here till I’m sombody else.” (Zhao Yuanren 1988 [1921], p. 21: 我就还在这儿底下呆着，等我是了一个别人再看 (yi ge bie ren – one different person).

109 For the history of classifiers in Chinese, see, among others, Peyraube 1991 and Gurevič 2008, esp. pp. 74–78. Among various interpretations of the classifiers’ development, the arguably most controversial ones are those by Hansen 1992 and Willman 2018. While Hansen (p. 49) argues that the mass/stuff ontology of classical China may have had a direct impact on the standardization of classifiers as markers of masshood, Willman (pp. 171f.) discusses this development as due to the natural selection and progress in Chinese language and thought: “[C]hildren today growing up in linguistic environments in which Chinese is spoken are learning Chinese more rapidly, but not because they are smarter. It is because over the past several millennia, Chinese itself, through its classical variants and into its modern forms, has adapted itself more efficaciously to the neurobiological mechanisms children have been utilizing to learn it.”

110 Chen Shou 1973, p. 927.

111 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 206.

112 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 264.

113 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 270.

114 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 339.

115 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 353.

116 Zhu Xi 2008, “Liang Hui wang zhangju shang” 梁惠王章句上 (“King Hui of Liang” I.7), pp. 207f.

117 Bold type added, V. V.

118 Legge 1960b, p. 140. Cf. Pulleyblank 1995, p. 59: “Why should I begrudge one ox?”

119 Pi chu is a not to be understood as a [Cl-N], but rather as a determining-determined construction, meaning “duckling” (lit.: a duck nestling).

120 Zhuangzi 1999, p. 270.

121 Legge 1960a, p. 120.

122 Sima Qian 1955, vol. 8, p. 3884.

123 鬢毛不覺白毿毿，一事無成百不堪 (The hair on my temples is suddenly all white, how can I bear the fact that I haven’t completed one single thing [in my life]?). Gu Xuexie 1979, p. 505. This verse gave origin to the idiom yi shi wu cheng 一事無成 (to achieve nothing).

124 見一葉落而知歲之將暮 (It is enough to see one falling leaf to understand that the year is approaching its end.). He Ning 1998, Chapter 16 “Shui shan xun” 說山訓 (A Mountain of Admonitions), p. 1158. These words gave origin to the expression yi ye zhi qiu 一葉知秋 (seeing one single leaf is enough to know about the autumn’s advent).

125 Mou Bo 1999, p. 49.

126 Wang – Yu 1992, p. 261.

127 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 212.

128 The same rendition is given in Nan Shan 1991, p. 34.

129 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 212.

130 Wang Xianshen 1998, Chapter “Wu Du” 五蠹 (“The Five Vermin”), pp. 442f.

131 Translated by Liao Wenkui 1939–1959, vol. II, p. 276.

132 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 139.

133 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 139.

134 Cf. the use of the measurer ge 个 and the numeral yi 一 (one) in Nan Shan 1991, p. 72.

135 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 139.

136 Cf. the German translation by Mögling 1984, p. 545, who interprets the object as a singular: “Daraufhin legte der Mann seinen Hakenpflug beiseite und hütete den Stumpf in der Hoffnung, noch einmal einen Hasen zu fangen.”

137 Wang Xianshen 1998, p. 266.

138 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 119.

139 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 118.

140 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 121.

141 Wang Tianming 1991, p. 120.

142 Kuang – Liu 2000, p. 474: 比喻将最根本的舍弃了，而取了不是根本的东西。

143 Ai – Shen 1990, p. 564. For an alternative interpretation of both du and zhu as plural, see Liao Wenkui 1939–1959, vol. II, p. 33.

144 Wang Qiangheng 1993, “Tang wen” 湯問 (The Questions of Tang), p. 131.

145 Wang Qiangheng 1993, p. 133.

146 Wang Qiangheng 1993, p. 134.

147 Zhuangzi 1999, p. 277.

148 Zhu Xi 2008, p. 292.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Viatcheslav Vetrov

Viatcheslav Vetrov (Si Feng 思風) received his Ph.D. in Sinology at the University of Bonn in 2009 and has since worked as a researcher in the Sinology departments of the universities of Münster, Zürich, Kyoto, and – currently – Heidelberg. His interests include philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics. Among his most recent publications are “Politically correct: Von philosophischen Entgleisungen zu einer gereinigten Philosophie,” minima sinica 2017/2, pp. 1–26, “Xin zi xue: Hanxue­zhuyi de tidai zhe?” 「新子學」——漢學主義的替代者?” Zhuzi xuekan 諸子學刊 2019, pp. 271–286, and “Coming to Terms with Evil,” in: Gotelind Müller-Saini and Nikolay Samoylov (eds.), Chinese Perceptions of Russia and the West (Heidelberg 2020), pp. 181–223.