Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese

Mingya Liu

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied languages, invites you to the ninth and last talk of the 2025-2026 academic year. The invited speaker is Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin) who will give a talk entitled "Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese" (see the abstract below). The event will take place online on Monday, JUNE 1, 14:30-16:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program here: https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, I will present two case studies of expressive language in Mandarin Chinese, both of which involve classifiers. In one case, classifiers such as "wei" and "zun" express honorification towards the token or kind denotation of the head noun. In the other case, expressive vocatives in Mandarin Chinese, contain the second person pronoun and the generic classifier "ge" and they express antihonorifiation towards the addressee. I will present a uniform multidimensional account of both phenomena, where the difference lies in whether the semantic composition relies on a type-shift operation or not.