The Chinese quantifier “pian” is a numerical classifier when used to measure the quantity of things such as leaves or fruit peel, but a scope quantifier when used to show the amount of ground surface, water surface, brightness or sound. The quantifier “pian”takes a fractal character when it is combined with “fruit peel-like nouns”, “open space-like nouns” or “wheat-like nouns”. In this case it measures either the part or the whole of an entity, as what is in the syntactic pattern “A large piece of N is divided into three small pieces...
