초록/요약

One of the typological characteristics of Chinese is the diversification of individual classifiers. Among the diverse individual classifiers is the general classifier ‘ge,’ which is applied to a wide range of nouns, and it is combined with different nouns by crossing over semantic categories. Therefore, while past research examines the progress of ‘gehua’ from both diachronic and synchronic aspects and makes arguments on that basis, there has been no discussion or prediction focusing on the linguistic changes in the future. This paper will present a study that predicts the direction of the development of a ‘gehua’ phenomenon, if it exists, in order to overcome the limitations of past research. In the meantime, this paper also attempts to find the clues of such development in the dialects whose classifier-noun combination appears different from that of Putonghua. In order to examine the patterns of changes if the scope of application of ‘ge’ is extended in the future, this article explores three types of nouns in Putonghua, that is, Inanimate Nouns related to ‘road’ and/or ‘river’ that are combined with ‘tiao,’ event nouns that are combined with ‘jian,’ and ‘cloud’ and/or ‘flower’ nouns that are combined with ‘duo.’ For the dialects, research on existing literature was carried out and additional surveys with the native speakers of those dialects were performed where necessary. After analyzed, the classifiers in respective dialects appeared very differently when combined with the nouns listed above, and consistent implicative relations were discovered as well. As argued in 이지은(2018), this article confirms that the expansion of the scope of application of ‘ge’ shows lexical diffusion, and that the stability of the semantic association with specific classifiers is an important mechanism. Other mechanisms observed in this paper include: ∙ Hyponyms are combined with ‘ge’ more easily than hypernyms because they are more specific. ∙ The nouns that have clear individualities and boundaries are combined with ‘ge’ more readily than other nouns. ∙ The nouns more frequently in spoken language are combined with ‘ge’ easily. However, all these mechanisms are not applied comprehensively to the nouns of every semantic class, whereas there is a complex operation of various factors at play. Thus, the implicative relationships drawn upon in this paper should be seen as a broader tendency, not as an absolute rule.