Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese - Sino-Platonic Papers

David Moser, "Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese" Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 22 (March 199 1)
complements in directional verbs such as & $, $, 3, etc., or
resultative verbs such as j& (as in 6 @) and 7 (as in @ 5 T), etc.
4.3. Chinese measure words, or classifiers, might be another place to
look for instructive errors. One of the ongoing questions asked about
classifiers is: To what extent are they applied mechanically (like gender in
Romance languages) and to what extent do they reflect deep cognitive
aspects of human category boundaries? There is general agreement among
linguists that classifiers in most cases have some semantic function, and
there are ongoing research projects in this area. For example, Tai & Wang
(1990) have studied similarities and differences in the use of classifiers
across various Chinese dialects.
Children's errors in acquiring the classifier system of Chinese have
already been used to support theories about the relevance of classifiers to
human conceptual mechanisms. Loke & Harrison (1986) and Clark (1977)
have studied overextensions and misapplications of shape classifiers in
young children learning Cantonese or Mandarin, and they have found that
the stages Chinese children go through in mastering classifiers corresponds
to the acquisition stages of shape concepts. One of Clark's findings was that
nearly all the criteria used by the young children in incorrect
over-extensions of shape classifiers have corresponding classifiers in other
languages with classifier systems. This would seem to imply that both
classifier systems and the underlying semantic system of children seem to
have been cognitively based on the same universal principles governing
categorization. That is, children's overextensions provide information about
the kinds of organizational principles humans use in trying to make sense
of the world. Mistakes in both children and adults involving classifiers
could be used to extend existing work on categories by researchers such as
Rosch (1 973) and Lakoff (1 987).
Allen (1977) brings up three ways of deciding whether or not
classifiers have a semantic function ( e . denote certain perceived
characteristics of the thing to which the associated noun refers). One is to
use the intuition of native informants, suspect though it may be. A second
is to use a foreign observer's intuition about the nature of the noun classes
revealed by classifiers - suspect though that may be. A third, more
performance-oriented method, is to introduce new words and objects to a
number of native speakers and see what classifiers they use with them. To
these three I would add a fourth: To observe speech errors involving
classifiers and see to what extent the slips reveal systematic
correspondences with category boundaries. For example: