A Comparative Study of the Semantic Meanings of ‘NumP+VP’ and ‘V+NumP’

Abstract

Numerals and Verbal Classifiers constitute NumP, which occupy the position of adverbial and complement respectively, and form two syntactic structures with verbs or verb phrases: ‘V+NumP’ and ‘NumP+VP’. This paper analyzes the imbalance of distribution, frequency and word form of Verbal Classifiers in the two structures, trying to clarify the semantic category of the two structures: ‘V+NumP’ indicates the efficacy, and  ‘NumP+VP’ indicates the comparison; it concludes that the pragmatic functions of the two structures: ‘V+NumP’ represents objective quantity, and ‘NumP+VP’ represents subjective quantity.