ABSTRACT
This chapter provides background information pertinent to the descriptive study of Chinese classifiers. It introduces the two competing views of language and classifiers, namely, the traditional grammar and the cognitive grammar. Although Chinese has a very rich tradition of phonological and lexicographical studies, the study of grammar is a rather recent development and has been greatly influenced by Western grammatical theories. Among the many problematic areas in Chinese grammar that developed using Western frameworks based on Indo-European languages, the classification of word classes is one of the most difficult. Cognitive linguistics arose from dissatisfaction with explanations of grammatical structures and word meanings by structural and generative linguistic theories. A prototype is a relatively abstract mental representation that assembles the key attributes or features that best represent instances of a given category. Image schemata, which arise from embodied experience, provide the conceptual building blocks for more complex concepts and ideas and can be systematically extended to construct more abstract concepts.
