갑골문을 통해서 본 중국어 양사의 출현 기제

The Mechanism of the Emergence of Chinese Classifiers in the Oracle Bone Inscriptions

This paper examines the numeral expressions ‘N(oun)+Nu(meral)+N(oun)’,‘Nu+N’ and ‘N+Nu’ in the Oracle Bone inscriptions (OBI) of the Shang Dynasty and proposes that the ‘N1+Nu+N2’ construction is directly related with the origin of classifiers in the Chinese linguistic history. The N1+Nu+N2construction, comprised of two immediate constituents of subject N1 and predicate Nu and N2, is divided into two types: the case in which N1 is the same noun as N2, which is called a repeater and serves as a primitive classifier, andthe case in which N1 is ａ　different noun from N2, which has already lost its lexical meaning but retained its grammatical function as a typical classifier.