Portioning-Out and Individuation in Mandarin Non-interrogative wh -Pronominal Phrases: Experimental Evidence From Child Mandarin

Portioning-out and individuation are two important semantic properties for the characterization of countability. In Mandarin, nouns are not marked with count-mass syntax, and it is controversial whether individuation is encoded in classifiers or in nouns. In the present study, we investigates the interpretation of a minimal pair of non-interrogative -pronominal phrases, including -N and -N. Due to the presence/absence of the individual classifier , these two -pronominal phrases differ in how they encode portioning-out and individuation. In two experiments, we used a Truth Value Judgment Task to examine the interpretation of these two -pronominal phrases by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4-to-6-year-old children. We found that both adults and children are sensitive to their interpretative differences with respect to the portioning-out and individuation properties. They assign either count or mass readings to the bare -pronominal phrase -N depending on specific contexts, but only count readings to the classifier-bearing -pronominal phrase -N. Moreover, the portioning-out and individuation properties associated with the individual classifier emerge independently in the course of language development, with the portioning-out property taking precedence over the individuation property. Taken together, the present study provides new evidence for the view that the portioning-out and individuation properties in Mandarin are encoded in classifiers rather than in nouns, and these two semantic properties are two distinct components in our grammar.