Articles in Spoken Chinese Revisited: Typological Perspectives

This paper (re)examines the articles in Spoken Chinese.In the light of cross-linguistic definition of article, it proposes that ge and zhe function as articles in Spoken Chinese in certain contexts.The articles have evolved via a mechanism of tonal change.In particular, ge and zhe no longer function as classifiers or demonstratives in the unstressed neutral tone, which differentiate the classifiers gè and zhè in that the latter ones keep the original high falling tone.It also discusses nà, yī, and yīgè, which are demonstrative, numeral, and classifier, respectively.This study fine-tunes some details in the typological profiles of articles and sheds lights on the classification of parts-of-speech in Mandarin Chinese.