Classifiers of Mandarin alphabetical words with character-alphabet structure

Abstract

Mandarin alphabetical words (MAWs) refer to the code-mixing of Romanized letters and characters such as X光 ‘X-ray’ in the Mandarin lexicon. Previous studies have mainly focused on MAWs’ formation but lacked empirical evidence regarding their morpho-syntactic behaviours. Classifiers have been used to infer nominals’ semantic properties and characteristics. An intriguing yet less explored issue is the classifier-selection pattern of MAWs and MAWs’ morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies. We adopt a corpus-based approach to handle this issue. Assuming that a MAW’s classifier is motivated by the head of that MAW, we hypothesize that when a MAW is integrated into the Mandarin lexicon, its dominant classifiers will be the semantically more specific ones and not the neutral classifier. We show that MAWs share a dominant compounding structure in Mandarin and that MAW's classifier is decided by that head even when the head is represented by alphabets.