On counting and measuring events

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of the ontology of the verbal domain with respect to empirical phenomena related to countability. I will take up the issue by discussing in particular the case of Mandarin Chinese, a language that has a specific functional category for counting in the verbal domain, the category of Verbal Classifiers (VCls, Paris (2011, 1981); Fassi Fehri and Vinet (2008), among others). I will show that verbal classifiers, as event counters, cannot be conflated with durative modifiers, which have the function of bounding the predicate by imposing a measure unit. Rather, VCls are functional devices which act as classifiers of verbal predicates that single out and count the individuals in the denotation of the VP.