'Pian' and 'kuai' are two polysemous lexemes in Chinese and play similar syntactic roles in sentences. For instance, they can be both suffixes (e.g., 'jin pian' "sliced gold" or 'jin kuai' "gold bar") and classifiers (e.g., 'yi pian/kuai bingan' "a piece of cookie"). They seem to have similar semantic functions (both are translated into "piece" in English. However, it is controversial whether they are interchangeable in certain context. In this study, I explored written discourse--newspapers, and found that 'pian tended to refer to flat and broad entities; while 'kuai' thick and lumpy entities. The former was used metaphorically much more often than the latter.
