Coercion and anaphoric use of Mandarin classifiers

Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese are required elements of well-formed noun phrases. They have to appear between the determiner and the noun as shown in example (1). The variety of classifiers, has been described and analyzed in [9, 4, 6] among others. Classifiers are often separated from measure words by requiring them to hold a [+sortal] attribute [4]. In [6], classifiers are divided into individual, kind and event classifiers on the ground of a corpusbased classifier dictionary [5]. A formal analysis of the distinction between kind and individual classifier has been proposed in [8]. In this study we will focus however on individual classifier and measure words.