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Concept
Measure word
Summary
In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun.
Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns (uncountable nouns), and in some cases also with count nouns. For instance, in English, is a mass noun and thus one cannot say "three muds", but one can say "three drops of mud", "three pails of mud", etc. In these examples, drops and pails function as measure words. One can also say "three pails of shells"; in this case the measure word pails accompanies a count noun (shells).
The term measure word is also sometimes used to refer to numeral classifiers, which are used with count nouns in some languages. For instance, in English no extra word is needed when saying "three people", but in many East Asian languages a numeral classifier is added, just as a measure word is added for uncountable nouns in English. For example, to say one dog and three dogs in Chinese, one would need to say yīzhīgǒu (simplified 一只狗, traditional 一隻狗) and sānzhīgǒu (simplified 三只狗, traditional 三隻狗) respectively, which could be literally translated as one animal dog and three animal dog respectively. There are numerous Chinese measure words, and nouns differ in what measure words they can use. While many linguists maintain a distinction between measure words and numeral classifiers, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. For instance, materials for teaching Chinese as a second language generally refer to Chinese classifiers as "measure words". The corresponding Chinese term is liàngcí (), which can be directly translated as "quantity word".
Most measure words in English correspond to units of measurement or containers, and are themselves count nouns rather than grammatical particles:
one quart of water
three cups of coffee
four kernels of corn, three ears of corn, two bushels of corn
Though similar in construction, fractions are not measure words. For example, in "seven-eighths of an apple" the fraction acts as a noun.
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