Language Acquisition and Language Change: Japanese Numeral Classifiers

Publisher Summary The quantification requires the selection of one of a set of special morphemes that designates certain semantic features of whatever is being enumerated. Changes in classifiers are interesting because they provide an occasion to investigate an idea of traditional concern in linguistics—the relationship between language learning and language change. One can use shape or process classifiers for most of the things that have their own taxonomy specific classifiers. The unmarked classifiers are used in place of the more specific marked forms and also true in situations where there are intergenerational differences in use of forms. Numeral classifiers differ from phonology as they appear infrequently in spontaneous conversation and classifier forms are not among the earliest part of the language mastered because they depend not only on the mastery of number concepts but also on having a set of lexemes representing concepts to which they can be applied.