Considering the syntax of DPs in south east Asian languages, a first important issue which needs to be examined and clarified is the syntactic status of the classifier elements which occur in DPs throughout the languages of the region. In the literature concerned with DP syntax in other classifier languages such as Japanese and Chinese there are actually two quite different assumptions about classifiers and he relation they have to numerals. On the one hand a number of works consider numbers and classifiers to instantiate distinct functional head positions, Num and CL (e.g. Pan 1990, Tang 1990). In other works however, numbers and classifiers are treated as comprising a single functional head labelled simply CL, Num or Q (e.g. Kawashima 1993, Muromatsu 1998). Somewhat surprisingly, there is often little explicit argumentation justifying one of the possible analyses over the other, and either one analysis or the other is frequently simply assumed without further discussion. Whether
numbers and classifiers instantiate a single or distinct heads is however an important question with significant consequences and it is therefore important to consider what arguments there are in favour of either of the two possible analyses.