THEORY OF PIVOTAL CLAUSE AND CHINESE LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the application of the theory of pivotal clause in chinese language processing. Three fundamental characteristics of Chinese grammar are briefly introduced: (i) grammatical simplification; (ii) grammatical compatibility; (iii) full exploitation of syntactic position. These characteristics may pose a great many difficulties for Chinese language processing. Based on these features, this paper argues that the theory of pivotal clause would be the best to study natural language processing taking into account the six influential theories in modern Chinese linguistics, for clause as the center of all grammatical units can both make up of sentence groups and discourse and closely relates to morphology as well as syntax. As an important theory to illustrate Chinese grammar, the theory of pivotal clause is not only in line with the characteristics of theme-oriented Chinese language but also in line with the international trend in linguistics, and it is of significance for the linguistic study of Chinese as well as for Chinese language processing. This paper also exhibits the specific application of the theory of pivotal clause in Chinese language processing based on two case studies, one of which is the segmentation and tagging of Chinese language, the other is automatic syntactic and semantic analysis of discourse coherence.