 Classifiers did not gain official recognition as a lexical category ( part of speech ) until the 20th century . The earliest modern text to discuss classifiers and their use was Ma Jianzhong 's 1898 Ma 's Basic Principles for Writing Clearly ( 马氏文通 ) . From then until the 1940s , linguists such as Ma , Wang Li , and Li Jinxi treated classifiers as just a type of noun that " expresses a quantity " . Lü Shuxiang was the first to treat them as a separate category , calling them " unit words " ( 单位词 dānwèicí ) in his 1940s Outline of Chinese Grammar ( 中国文法要略 ) and finally " measure words " ( 量词 liàngcí ) in Grammar Studies ( 语法学习 ) . He made this separation based on the fact that classifiers were semantically bleached , and that they can be used directly with a number , whereas true nouns need to have a measure word added before they can be used with a number . After this time , other names were also proposed for classifiers : Gao Mingkai called them " noun helper words " ( 助名词 zhùmíngcí ) , Lu Wangdao " counting markers " ( 计标 jìbiāo ) , and Japanese linguist Miyawaki Kennosuke called them " accompanying words " ( 陪伴词 péibàncí ) . In the Draft Plan for a System of Teaching Chinese Grammar ( 暂拟汉语教学语法系统 ) adopted by the People 's Republic of China in 1954 , Lü 's " measure words " ( 量词 liàngcí ) was adopted as the official name for classifiers in China . This remains the most common term in use today . 
