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THE INTERACTION BETWEEN NUMBER AND PERSON IN CHINESE

Certain linguistic phenomena cannot be explained by syntax and/or semantics alone. They require taking into account of pragmatic elements such as speech acts, discourse structure, deixis, etc. The plural suffix -men in Mandarin Chinese is a case in point. -Men occurs with both personal pronouns and nouns. However, while it is regularly added to pronouns, it appears only occasionally though not randomly with nouns. In fact, most of the time nouns remain unmarked, the context providing the necessary information. The occurrence of -men after nouns is highly constrained : 1) humanness (in principle, nouns denote human beings) ; 2) incompatibility with counting (*san ge haizimen as opposed to san ge haizi ‘three children’); 3) definiteness (N-men is definite, it involves a second mention of previously posited entities, haizimen ‘the children’) ; 4) modal value (the use of -men brings out a special connotation of affective proximity or empathy). To sum up, it is a necessary condition for -men to occur that the number of entities be greater than (n > 1), but this is not sufficient. Unlike the plural in Indo-European languages, -men is not governed solely by considerations of number, but also by something else. Clarifying the conditions of the use of -men with nouns has been a major unsolved problem in Chinese linguistics for almost a hundred years, because this optional use cannot be captured in terms of syntactic, semantic or any other mechanical rules. It is discourse-motivated and depends on pragmatic factors. In narrative contexts (with n > 1), -men is not obligatory after nouns, the speaker is free to use it or not. However, his choice is not neutral. If he elects to use it, this entails a subtle difference of meaning. The presence of -men invariably induces a modal value, qualified as empathy. Compare :