Dr. Trang Phan

Counting and Referring: Classifiers, Plurals, and Articles from a Vietnamese Perspective 

Vietnamese is commonly described as a classifier language: nouns combine with classifiers in counting expressions, and bare nouns can occur as nominal arguments. Yet Vietnamese also has elements that appear, at first sight, unexpected in a classifier system: the highly productive markers những/các, usually glossed as plural, and một ‘one’, which has developed an indefinite-article use. These facts raise a broader question for the typology of Southeast Asian nominal systems: how much variation is possible once classifiers are part of the grammar? In this talk, I examine the syntactic position and semantic contribution of these elements. The markers những/các differ from familiar plural morphology such as Mandarin -men: they occur above classifiers, combine with non-human nouns, and do not produce associative readings with proper names. Their behavior in number contexts and in diagnostics for definiteness and indefiniteness suggests that they are not simple English-type plural markers. Rather, they are number-neutral, definite-oriented elements within a classifier-based nominal architecture. I then discuss một ‘one’, which also occurs above classifiers and passes key tests for indefiniteness, supporting its analysis as an overt indefinite article. The resulting picture is not a simple opposition between “classifier languages” and “article/plural languages.” Vietnamese has classifiers, productive plural-marking strategies, and an overt indefinite article, while lacking an overt definite article. Definiteness is instead expressed through a layered system involving covert type-shifting and, in more articulated structures, a null definite D. Vietnamese thus shows how a Southeast Asian classifier language can preserve the classifier system while building new functional categories above it, offering a comparative perspective on nominal reference.