From Chinese 隻 to Vietnamese chiếc: Diachronic Grammatical Integration of a Borrowed Classifier

This article traces the written history of Vietnamese chiếc, a classifier of early Chinese origin that coexists with the later literary Sino-Vietnamese reading chích. This study examines 63 occurrences in nine texts, from early Hán Nôm Buddhist materials to Quốc ngữ prose from the mid-twentieth century, and codes them by construction, semantic domain, discourse function, and textual setting. The earliest clear attestation, chiếc giày “a shoe” in Thiền tông Khóa hư ngữ lục, occurs beside the Buddhist expression 隻履, chích lí, which provides a specific entry context mediated by contact. Subsequent texts do not reproduce a single Chinese distribution. Instead, chiếc enters Vietnamese quantified phrases, classifier noun phrases without numerals, phrases marked for plurality, proper name constructions, and elliptical reference. Its tokens remain sparse in most texts, but nineteenth-century travel prose supplies a dense vessel pattern, while Sống mòn extends the classifier to pointable artifacts, clothing, and teeth. This article therefore distinguishes grammatical integration from a change in which a lexical item becomes grammatical: a borrowed classifier is redistributed through constructions in the recipient language and through discourse shaped by particular genres. The findings support a modest account of constructional expansion shaped jointly by contact, Vietnamese nominal syntax, semantic persistence, and textual ecology. Tracing one classifier across different textual settings makes it possible to distinguish its Chinese source, the textual channel through which it entered Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese constructions that shaped its later use.