Please join us for the following talk in room G26, 7 George Square. The link to the online Teams meeting will be sent to the mailing list closer to the time for those who cannot join us in Edinburgh.

Speaker

Time and date

Tuesday 5th May, 2 PM.

Title and abstract

Mandarin classifiers are often thought to reflect the semantic properties of nouns, but in practice, speakers do not always agree on which classifier to use—especially for more abstract words. In this talk, I present exploratory findings from a norming survey examining how speakers pair classifiers with both concrete and abstract nouns. Fifty native Mandarin speakers were asked to provide classifiers for a range of nouns. This allows us to look not just at the “correct” classifier, but at how consistent (or inconsistent) these choices are across speakers. Using entropy as a measure of variability, I show that classifier selection becomes more dispersed as nouns become more abstract. In contrast, concrete nouns tend to show clearer preferences, often with a dominant classifier. Overall, the results suggest that classifier use is more flexible for abstract nouns, while more concrete nouns show greater agreement across speakers. I will briefly discuss what this might tell us about patterns of classifier use.

The meeting link is distributed on our mailing list. If you’re not subscribed to this list, please email us at ppls.psycholingcoffee@ed.ac.uk