The paper deals with the semantics of the nominal suffix -men and NP-men in Mandarin Chinese. In sinologist linguistics, -men is often considered as a "marker of collectivity". However, the term collectivity (jihe in Chinese) is confusing. In semantics, the concept of collectivity refers to two things, collective interpretation of a NP and collective nouns. This distinction can help to clarify the usage of -men. The author argues that the suffix -men is a marker of plurality, with [plural] feature due to its denotation. It indicates the number of a NP. In this paper, -men will be analyzed with respect to the collective and distributive interpretations of NP-men, especially when it co-occurs with different types of predicates.
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