{"title":"A corpus-based analysis of Vietnamese 'classifiers' <i>con</i> and <i>cái</i>.","authors":"Giang Pham, Kathryn Kohnert","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The purpose of this study is to examine the use of two common Vietnamese 'classifiers,' <i>con</i> (animacy) and <i>cái</i> (inanimacy) using language corpora data of over one million words. This information may contribute to an ongoing debate of whether Vietnamese 'classifiers' are a distinct word class or a subclass of nouns. Frequency and distributions were calculated using computer software. Lexical-semantic functions were manually analyzed for each occurrence. Findings indicated that <i>con</i> and <i>cái</i> were highly frequent and distributed across text genres. However, neither form consistently demonstrated a classifying function: <i>con</i> indicated animacy less than 24% of the time, and <i>cái</i> indicated inanimacy less than 65% of the time. Corpus-based analysis is a useful tool to make comparisons between prototypical and 'real-life' language use. If Vietnamese 'classifiers' are not consistently used as such, considering this group of words a subclass of nouns rather than a distinct word class may be more parsimonious.</p>","PeriodicalId":92561,"journal":{"name":"Mon-Khmer studies","volume":"38 ","pages":"161-171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6326581/pdf/nihms957083.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36902437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}