Unifying modifiers, classifiers and demonstratives

We argue that the distributional properties of modifiers, classifiers and
 demonstratives with respect to nouns in Mandarin Chinese motivate a head-functor approach
(Van Eynde 2006), where numeral-classifier-noun sequences are analyzed as left
branching structures with the noun as the head. This approach explains the
distributional similarities between all prenominal categories by unifying their
combinatorial properties under a single phrasal schema while also accounting for their
differences by means of selectional constraints and a hierarchy of marking
values. We also analyze classifiers themselves as special kinds of noun. All in all, our
analysis entails that nominal complexes in Mandarin Chinese are fundamentally
different from those found in languages with dedicated specifiers (e.g. determiners
in a language like English), suggesting a two-way typology that is parallel to the
NP/DP parameter proposed in the minimalist tradition (Bošković 2007, i.a.).