37.1873, FYI: STAL Seminar: Mingya Liu, "Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1873. Fri May 22 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1873, FYI: STAL Seminar: Mingya Liu, "Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese"

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Date: 22-May-2026
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: Mingya Liu, "Expressive Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese"


The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home), an international and
interdisciplinary network whose primary aim is to promote work on
slurs, pejoratives, expressives and evaluative terms from less studied
languages, invites you to the ninth and last talk of the 2025-2026
academic year. The invited speaker is Mingya Liu (Humboldt University
of Berlin), who will give a talk entitled "Expressive Classifiers in
Mandarin Chinese" (see the abstract below). The event will take place
online on Monday, JUNE 1, 14:30-16:00 Central European Summer Time
(CEST), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series (program
here: https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want
to participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom
link.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will present two case studies of expressive language
in Mandarin Chinese, both of which involve classifiers. In one case,
classifiers such as "wei" and "zun" express honorification towards the
token or kind denotation of the head noun. In the other case,
expressive vocatives in Mandarin Chinese, contain the second person
pronoun and the generic classifier "ge" and they express
antihonorifiation towards the addressee. I will present a uniform
multidimensional account of both phenomena, where the difference lies
in whether the semantic composition relies on a type-shift operation
or not.

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Mandarin Chinese (cmn)




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