Counting and countability in classifier languages: evidence from Donglan Zhuang

This article addresses the issue of how nominal countability is grammatically encoded and how the counting function is realized in classifier languages by investigating classifier phrases in Donglan Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language. According to the prevailing individuation account, classifiers are required to individuate nouns, which can then be counted by numerals. Under this approach, countability and counting are conflated. Donglan Zhuang has two syntactically distinct types of classifiers, namely, numeral classifiers CL_num and noun classifiers CL_nom. CL_num performs the counting/measuring function, comparable to the cardinality function proposed in Scontras (The semantics of measurement, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2014), and CL_nom encodes syntactic countability by singling out sortal nouns from the mass domain, whereby sortal nouns are, meanwhile, turned into (taxonomic) kind terms. Noun classifiers in Donglan Zhuang pose a challenge to Chierchia’s (Nat Lang Semant 6(4):339–405, 1998) “bare argument hypothesis” and suggest that bare nouns in classifier languages are not uniform with respect to the [±argument] parametric setting.