“- <i>Men</i> in Mandarin Chinese: A Case Study of Group Marker”

This study investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of the morpheme - men in Mandarin. Nouns suffixed with - men exhibit a range of properties typically associated with group terms in English and the “group-like comitative coordination” observed in Russian and Polish. The analysis demonstrates that - men in Mandarin functions as a group marker within the Determiner Phrase (DP). This analysis of - men as a group marker offers a coherent explanation for its core properties. Crucially, the findings of this analysis provide empirical evidence that groups are distinct from plurals and must be clearly distinguished from them, both semantically and syntactically. Furthermore, these findings offer insights into the nature of plurality-like suffixes in classifier languages such as East Asian languages, including Mandarin.