The word formation of Chinese noun classifiers not only expresses the conceptual meaning of the nominal element, but also carries the special grammatical meaning of a collective generic reference. This is closely related to the unique compositional characteristics and generative mechanism of the word formation of noun classifiers. Previous studies have focused on the structural types and lexical meanings of the word formation of noun classifiers, but have not explored the grammatical justifications for the formation and semantic changes in this word formation structure, Based on the Distributed Morphology (DM) theory, this paper explores the syntactic conditions for the for mation of noun classifier structure from a syntactic perspective, and explains the rationale for the acquisition of grammatical meaning of noun classifier based on the syntactic structure. This paper ar gues that Chinese classifiers are functional categories, and that the word formation of noun classifier results in the construction with an additional form after noun morphemes which are created by syntac tic structure. The combination of nominal and classifier morphemes is driven by the functional classif ying element in the process of word formation, and the grammatical features of the functional compo nents in different levels of the noun phrase structure are acquired through displacement, and then the combination is lexicalized into words with grammatical meaning, which have developed into grammat ical words in essence.
