Me:
>> It is so in the sense that in the languages of Eastern
and South-
Eastern Asia the usage of classifiers is a very developed feature.
But really, something similar is attested also in many other
languages,
including some IE ones.
>> ... I think, something similar exists even
in such English
expressions as: two cups of coffee, five glasses of milk,
etc.
Richard:
> In the examples you give, the construction is resorted
to
because 'coffee' and 'milk' are uncountable. And the classifier
analogue is not fixed; you could have two mugs of coffee, depending
on
whether you have a saucer to rest the container on. A good
example is
beer - three bottles of beer / three mugs of beer / three
pints of peer -
depending very much on how it is dispensed. At a
pinch 'coffee' and
'beer' may be made countable in commerical
cicumstances, where the unit is
fixed by context.
> The better analogy is 'three head of
cattle'. The classifier-
equivalent is fixed here. But I wonder
if this is because 'cattle'
is close to being uncountable, perhaps because
it has no singular,
but has an obvious unit. I do not feel comfortable
saying 'three
cattle'; I would say 'three cows', or 'three heifers', or
'three
bullocks', etc. depending on the age and sex of the
animals.
I think that it is possible to describe English as a language that
needs classifiers with uncountable nouns :-) It is interesting that in Russian,
where classifiers are used more widely, with uncountable nouns they are not
obligatory (as thay are not with other nouns). For example, when you are buying
two bottles of milk in a shop, you may say either:
dve butylki moloka
two CLF (lit. bottles) milk
or:
dva moloka
two milk
Nevertheless, the construction
without classifiers becomes impossible if the numeral demands the noun to be
morpholoically plural ("2", "3", "4" in Russian do
not, but others do). It is because uncountable nouns have no plural form, and
therefore when buying 10 bottles of milk, it is possible to say only <desjat'
butylok moloka> - with a classifier.
==========
Vadim
Ponaryadov