Abstract: Individual classifiers primarily exist in Sino-Tibetan languages. Similar to the closed word class (determiners, pronouns etc) functionally, classifiers can not be used as a component separately, and usually they have to combine numbers (or pronouns) and nouns together to make up phrases in sentence. In this review, several possibilities to the reason why a large number of individual classifiers developed in modern Chinese language were summarized firstly. Then the mechanism of bidirectional selection and constraint between classifiers and nouns, the possible impacts of classifiers in language on cognition, and the acquisition of classifiers by individual, were introduced. Finally, future direction was discussed.

Key words: individual classifiers, nouns, grammatical determiner, cognitive processing, Chinese