ABSTRACT
This chapter is an examination of the status of the classifier ge in nominal and verbal environments. There are two types of (related) elements pronounced as ge in Mandarin Chinese. One is a general classifier which is commonly used to “type” or individuate a noun which follows it for purposes of counting. The other ge will be shown to be used to count the event denoted by the predicate (in which ge occurs) as a single event. While the first use of ge has long been known as the most general classifier in Mandarin, the second type of ge has not been investigated thoroughly in the literature. The discussion in this chapter will be focused on the second type of ge. Section 2.1 presents ge as the most general classifier for count nouns. Section 2.2 discusses the distribution and the semantic contribution of the event classifier ge. Section 2.3 presents the syntactic properties of the event classifier ge. Section 2.4 makes a proposal to structurally encode ge within the DP in a way which mirrors its central syntactic properties. Section 2.5 then argues for the grammaticalization of ge from a classifier to a determiner. Section 2.6 is a brief conclusion.
