Introduction

This chapter consists of four parts. First, it indicates the main themes to be covered and the theoretical premises of this book. Second, it offers a brief historical introduction to Chinese classifiers, showing that the use of classifiers as an independent grammatical category is a phenomenon that emerged at a later stage in the development of Chinese. Third, some representative analyses concerning the understanding of Chinese classifiers in the context of contemporary linguistics are introduced, and the notion of classifiers adopted in this book is specified. Fourth, a chapter-by-chapter overview of this book is provided.