The modification puzzle of Mandarin numeral phrases

Abstract

It has been observed in the literature that the nominal-internal word order influences the specificity in Mandarin Chinese (Huang, 1982; Tang, 1990; Yang, 2005; Partee, 2006; Zhang, 2006). In this paper, we concentrate on numeral phrases that contain modifiers and show how their interaction displays the interpretational difference. We propose a semantic solution that consists of two resources, namely (i) the semantics of classifiers from Japanese (Sudo, 2016), and (ii) the semantics of relative clauses from Turkish (Sağ, 2019). We show that this specificity contrast is pervasive in Mandarin nominal constructions that deserve a uniform account.