ABSTRACT
Completive and durative temporal adverbials, as discussed in Chapter 3, are a special type of quantifying constructions providing temporal information. Quantifi ers are a linguistic concept that mirrors quantity in reality. They indicate ‘how many’ or ‘how much’, for example, the number of an entity denoted by a noun, the count of an action or event, length of time, or distance in space. All human languages have linguistic devices that express such ideas, though the encoding of natural language semantics can vary from language to language. This chapter compares quantifying constructions in English and Chinese by focusing on classifi ers in Chinese and their counterparts in English, as well as the interaction between quantifying constructions and the progressive aspect, which is normally ruled out by aspect theory, with the aim of addressing the following questions:1
What linguistic devices are used in Chinese and English for • quantifi cation? How different (or similar) are classifi ers in Chinese as a classifi er lan-• guage and in English as a non-classifi er language? Can quantifying constructions interact with progressives in English • and Chinese if such interactions are theoretically ruled out by aspect theory?
