Chinese Syntax Research Articles

A New Look at the Classical Chinese Dào of the Relation between Word and World

AbstractI argue that the absence of some of the ‘greatest hits’ of Western philosophy in Classical China can be explained by a Wittgensteinian take on the role of language in philosophy. One is the ‘Idea Theory’ of meaning which anchors Western Mind-Body dualism. Its attraction is removed when the writing reminds us that a picture does not by itself ‘give life to’ our language even while it plays a role of cross-linguistic communication. Another is the centrality of a law-command theory of normativity which combines with mind-body dualism to give a natural push toward monotheistic supernaturalism. Western attempts to make the ‘God’ impulse logical (e.g., the Ontological Argument) fail because of differences in Chinese syntax. The upshot is we need not deny Chinese thinkers the status of philosophers for their failure to share our philosophical presuppositions and resultant agenda.

Confidence-based Syntax encoding network for better ancient Chinese understanding

While neural-based models continue to make rapid strides, syntax remains a foundational element in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in the context of Chinese language understanding. However, there exists a significant gap in research that integrates syntactic information for the understanding of ancient Chinese, primarily due to the lack of high-quality syntactic annotations. This paper explores the untapped potential of syntax to enhance ancient Chinese understanding, leveraging the “not-so-perfect” noisy syntax trees generated by unsupervised derivations and modern Chinese syntax parsers. To achieve this, we introduce a novel syntax encoding component: the confidence-based syntax encoding network (cSEN). This component is tailored to mitigate the side-effects arising from the noise associated with unsupervised syntax derivations and the incompatibility between ancient and modern Chinese. We validate the importance of syntax information and the efficacy of our cSEN through experimental tasks, specifically ancient poetry theme classification and ancient–modern Chinese translation. Our findings suggest that proper implementation of syntactic information can effectively enhance model understanding of ancient Chinese. The introduced cSEN proves vital in noise-rich environments, potentially revolutionizing the way information professionals approach and utilize ancient Chinese texts.

Chinese tag questions: the CP/DP pro-form analysis

Abstract This paper investigates the behaviors of tag questions in Chinese and proposes a unifying analysis involving empty CP/DP pro-forms and predication. It is found that there are universally two types of Tag questions – (i) the invariable type and (ii) the (modal) verbal type, which correspond to the question-types in Chinese syntax. Previous research by Culivocer (1992. English tag questions in Universal Grammar. Lingua 88. 193–226) analyzed English tag questions as a pro-IP structure that is bound by a previous sentence. However, in Chinese, two types of tag questions include both A-not-A form and particle form. Furthermore, both the two kinds of tag questions display syntactic predication between the tag and an empty subject pro. An abbreviated “yes-no question” is attached to empty CP/DP constituents in these constructions.

The Evolution of the Concept of Complement (补语 bǔyǔ) in Chinese Linguistics

The article is devoted to the description of buyu (补语 bǔyǔ), i. e. a linguistic concept of a complement perceived as a special part of a sentence in Chinese linguistics. The problem of distinguishing grammatical units of a sentence that share one syntactic function is considered. Less than a century ago China did not have any knowledge of theoretical linguistics of its own, so it had to borrow the concept from foreign science. Thus, the notion of a complement that supplements the semantics of a verb or an adjective in a predicate was introduced by Li Jinxi who had borrowed it from English grammars and applied to Chinese syntax. However, soon enough it had become a subject of revision. The article reflects how the concept of buyu has become a mixture of related linguistic phenomena by its gradual meaning extension. Besides, the paper analyses topmost structural and semantic features of the units that perform the role of buyu in a sentence, as well as summarises the criteria for distinguishing it from other parts of a sentence, i. e. an object and adverbial modifier. It is claimed that a single and consistent approach should be employed to the relevant elements with the same syntactic function and that the existing descriptions of Chinese grammar should be reexamined providing the concept of buyu. Finally, the author stresses the necessity to use the term dopolnitel’niy element (‘an additional element’) for terminology consistency in Russian sinological literature.

Çince Söz Diziminin Tipolojik Açıdan Rusça ve Kırgızca ile Karşılaştırılması

Dillerde tipolojik yönelimi belirlemede kullanılan cümle kalıpları aracılığıyla yapılan incelemede “VO” sıralamalı diller ile aynı grupta yer almış olan Çin dilinin “OV” sıralamalı diller ile daha benzer bir yapıya sahip olduğu gözlemlenmiştir. Bu nedenle çalışmamız Çin dilini tipolojik açıdan “OV” sıralamalı dil olarak kabul görmüş olan Kırgızca ve “VO” sıralamalı dil olarak kabul görmüş olan Rusça ile karşılaştırıp, dillerin tipolojik açıdan “OV” tip mi, yoksa “VO” tip mi olduğunu belirlemede kullanılan cümle kalıplarının geçerliliğini somut örnekleme yöntemi ile yeniden test etmiştir. Yapılan inceleme ile dillerin yönelimini belirlemede kullanılan kalıpların geçerli olduğu sonucuna varılmıştır. Çince tipolojik açıdan incelendiğinde “VO” tip bir dil olan Rusçadan farklı, “OV” tip bir dil olan Kırgızca ile daha benzer bir sıralamaya sahiptir. Bu da Çincenin fiil konumları açısından “VO” diller ile benzerlik gösteren ancak diğer cümle ögelerinin sıralamaları açısından “OV” tip bir dil olarak değerlendirilmesi gerektiğini açık bir şekilde göstermektedir. Çincenin “OV-VO” diller ile benzer ve farklı yönlerinin anlaşılması, Çince öğrenen her iki tip dilin kullanıcıları açısından oldukça önemlidir.

Research on Traditional Mongolian-Chinese Neural Machine Translation Based on Dependency Syntactic Information and Transformer Model

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a data-driven machine translation approach that has proven its superiority in large corpora, but it still has much room for improvement when the corpus resources are not abundant. This work aims to improve the translation quality of Traditional Mongolian-Chinese (MN-CH). First, the baseline model is constructed based on the Transformer model, and then two different syntax-assisted learning units are added to the encoder and decoder. Finally, the encoder’s ability to learn Traditional Mongolian syntax is implicitly strengthened, and the knowledge of Chinese-dependent syntax is taken as prior knowledge to explicitly guide the decoder to learn Chinese syntax. The average BLEU values measured under two experimental conditions showed that the proposed improved model improved by 6.706 (45.141–38.435) and 5.409 (41.930–36.521) compared with the baseline model. The analysis of the experimental results also revealed that the proposed improved model was still deficient in learning Chinese syntax, and then the Primer-EZ method was introduced to ameliorate this problem, leading to faster convergence and better translation quality. The final improved model had an average BLEU value increase of 9.113 (45.634–36.521) compared with the baseline model at experimental conditions of N = 5 and epochs = 35. The experiments showed that both the proposed model architecture and prior knowledge could effectively lead to an increase in BLEU value, and the addition of syntactic-assisted learning units not only corrected the initial association but also alleviated the long-term dependence between words.

On the nature of morphological alternations in Archaic Chinese and their relevance to morphosyntax

AbstractWhile sound glosses from the Six Dynasties and early Tang provide direct evidence for morphological alternations in Archaic Chinese, studies on the syntax of this language generally disregard these data. This neglect is due in part to perceived unreliability of these sound glosses. In this paper, I first argue that the arguments against their reliability do not stand scrutiny, and that they are not a simple philological curiosity, but have the potential to enrich studies on Archaic Chinese syntax, and plead for more collaboration between syntacticians and historical phonologists.

Catholic intellectuals in modern China and their Bible translation: Li Wenyu and Ma Xiangbo

AbstractLi Wenyu and Ma Xiangbo were two influential Catholic intellectuals in modern China who each undertook a translation of the Bible into Chinese. This article surveys their participation in contemporary ideological debates and investigates their thoughts on the inculturation of Catholicism, including ‘evangelisation by writing’ and ‘scholastic mission’, as well as their beliefs and practices regarding Bible translation. An in-depth comparison of their translations is also provided, illuminating the different approaches taken by Li and Ma in dealing with terminology, sentence structure, linguistic style, and theological implications. Li conformed to Chinese biblical terminology established by the Catholic missionaries who preceded him and adhered to the syntax of Classical Chinese; in contrast, Ma's linguistic style is approximate to Easy Wenli, and he adopted words and phrases from traditional Chinese culture to transmit the Catholic faith. The two translators demonstrated two choices of indigenising Catholicism and the Bible in China: ‘mirror-type’ and ‘bridge-type’.

Parsing Chinese with Combinatory Categorial Grammar: A Linguistic and Computational Study

Parsing Chinese language with CCG is very difficult because the architecture and assumptions of CCG do not fit well with facts from Chinese. Based on the concept of “realization” proposed by Zhu Dexi (1920–1992), this study sheds light on the discrepancy between CCG and Chinese syntax and puts forward a refined schema for Chinese compositionality. The discussion is supported by the data of Chinese CCGbank (CASS). Furthermore, by activating a function‐based category setting and a noun/verb disambiguating tagging mechanism, we develop a rule‐based mini‐Chinese CCG parser without deep learning. The new NVN parser surpasses existing Chinese CCG parser C&C in parsing effect (LF 85.9 vs. LF 74.6) on a partial PCTB 6.0 test set of 500 sentences.

Analyzing the Phenomenon of English-Chinese Intransitive Verbs with Objects

Academics have paid close attention to intransitive verbs with objects as a unique language phenomenon. This article aims to examine the phenomenon of intransitive verbs carrying objects in Chinese from the standpoints of syntactic structure and cognitive linguistic theory. The object of intransitive verbs is categorized, as well as the syntactic structure of intransitive verbs with objects. Additionally, a comparison of English and Chinese intransitive verbs with objects is made, and the structure of intransitive verbs with objects is analyzed for rationality. The analysis of 38 international students' actual learning situations, as well as valid questionnaires and corpora, is used to determine whether second language learners from various language systems can comprehend and master the structure of "intransitive verbs with object" in Chinese despite significant language system differences. Finally, despite the impact of COVID-19 on the project survey, we discovered that students whose first language was not Chinese had varying levels of bias in their perception and acquisition of intransitive verbs with objects, owing to the negative effects of their mother tongue and different teaching methods. Most notably, the versatility of the syntactic structure of "intransitive verbs with objects" complicates learning Chinese syntax, which is already difficult in comparison to English. This leads us to believe that more study is required to further our understanding of the peculiar grammatical phenomenon known as "intransitive verbs with objects" and to apply our findings to the study of contemporary Chinese and language learning.

Improving sentiment analysis accuracy with emoji embedding

Due to the diversity and variability of Chinese syntax and semantics, accurately identifying and distinguishing individual emotions from online texts is challenging. To overcome this limitation, we incorporate a new source of individual sentiment, emojis, which contain thousands of graphic symbols and are increasingly being used for expressing emotion in online conversations. We examined popular sentiment analysis algorithms, including rule-based and classification algorithms, to evaluate the impact of supplementing emojis as additional features to improve the algorithm performance. Emojis were also translated into corresponding sentiment words when constructing features for comparison with those directly generated from emoji label words. In addition, considering different functions of emojis in texts, we classified all posts in the dataset by their emoji usage and examined the changes in algorithm performance. We found that emojis are effective as expanding features for improving the accuracy of sentiment analysis algorithms, and the algorithm performance can be further increased by taking different emoji usages into consideration. In this study, we developed an improved emoji-embedding model based on Bi-LSTM (namely, CEmo-LSTM), which achieves the highest accuracy (around 0.95) when analyzing online Chinese texts. We applied the CEmo-LSTM algorithm to a large dataset collected from Weibo from December 1, 2019 to March 20, 2020 to understand the sentiment evolution of online users during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the pandemic remarkably impacted individual sentiments and caused more passive emotions (e.g., horror and sadness). Our novel emoji-embedding algorithm creatively combined emojis as well as emoji usage with the sentiment analysis model and can handle emotion mining tasks more effectively and efficiently.

Shimaumi: Aquapelagic imagery and poetics of ‘island-laying’ in Kojiki

Kojiki, one of the oldest surviving records of Japanese history and mythology compiled in 712 CE, tells of the origin of the Japanese archipelago and nation. The initial chapter is known as shimaumi, or ‘island-laying’, where the birth of gods also gives rise to the formation of Japanese islands. This paper considers two aspects of shimaumi, firstly the spatiality of the myth and how aquapelagic imagery occurs both within shima (a locus of livelihood) and within the choice of kanji. Secondly, this paper considers how the aquapelagic imagery of shimaumi can be characterised as territorializing the sacred through ‘island-naming as a god’. Additionally, while Kojiki is mostly written in classical Chinese, some Japanese words and phrases are used for island names, onomatopoeia, mystical words and transliterated poetry within Chinese syntax. Performance, particularly of these Japanese elements, means that Kojiki can be viewed as an act of totohogi; a rejuvenation of the world in Japanese cosmology that is as individual as each re-telling.

Realization and optimization of Chinese syntactic analyzer based on PCFG

As a basic research work, syntactic analysis is also a key technology in the field of natural language processing, and is the basis for deep understanding of language. The syntactic analyzer is an important tool for syntactic analysis. The Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG) model is the basic model of most parsers with excellent performance. Good effect. This article integrates named entity clues into PCFG-based Chinese syntax analysis models, completes joint learning and decoding of named entity recognition, syntactic analysis, and implements a fast and reliable decoding parser.

Literary Quotations in Bilingual Dictionaries: A Case Study of a Nineteenth-century Dutch–Chinese Dictionary

The phenomenon of literary quotations in dictionaries finds its origin in the days when the search for equivalents was intertextual rather than interlingual based. For both monolin­gual and bilingual dictionaries the purpose of literary quotations is to supply evidence of usage and illuminate the meaning of the relevant headword, with the difference that for bilingual dic­tionaries this is done via translation. This article examines this phenomenon in a nineteenth century Dutch–Chinese dictionary by analysing sample sentences that the compiler has extracted from original Chinese texts. Discussion of examples from different types of text will probe the function­ing of the quotations and the intention of the compiler. The inclusion of the quotations in the dic­tionary appear to be the result of both linguistic and cultural intention, in the sense that they are revealing of the syntax of Chinese but also aspects of Chinese culture. These findings will contrib­ute to the understanding of the practice of the inclusion of literary quotations in bilingual dictionaries and the role of the compiler in introducing foreign cultural aspects.

Paraphrase and parallel treebank for the comparison of French and Chinese syntax

AbstractThis paper proposes to study the contrastive syntax of French and Chinese through the lens of syntactic mismatches, and by making use of parallel treebanks. A syntactic mismatch is the non-similarity between the syntactic structures of one linguistic unit and its translation. Syntactic mismatches are formalized using the notion of paraphrase from the Meaning-Text Theory, which allows for capturing mismatches at different levels of the linguistic description (e.g. Semantic, Deep-Syntactic, and Surface-Syntactic). In this paper, we report in details on the types of paraphrases found in the seed corpus used, demonstrating that the Deep-Syntactic paraphrases constitute the best starting point for our study. Then, we show how, starting from the seed corpus, we semi-automatically constructed a multi-layer parallel treebank with the alignment and annotation of paraphrases.

V-V Compounds in Chinese: Syntactic Perspective Revisited

This article revisits the formation of the resultative V-V compounds in Chinese. While presenting evidence to show the inadequacies of the lexicalist approach, we instead argue that these compounds are derived via syntactic operations. Meanwhile, the multiple readings of V-V compounds, once claimed to be the strong argumentation of the lexicalist account, are actually the results of such characteristics of Chinese syntax as the object realization, focalization, and topic-prominence. The evidence provided by the lexicalists thus does not constitute an argument against the syntactic account.

Teaching and Learning the Awareness of Existence in English Existential Sentences

This present study investigates the reasons that cause Chinese students’ difficulties, in learning English existential sentence, there-be structure. A set of questions are designed to examine their awareness of ‘existence’ in both languages. 609 participants attain this study. After data analysis, two findings indicate: (1) Students are used to selecting location as a subject starting an existential sentence which is similar to Chinese syntax, and there-be might be considered of using only when location is not given. (2) With the influence of Chinese syntax, the awareness between the place and the main noun forms because that a thing/object as a subject keeps have / has as its verb could change sentence construction and cannot effectively express the original existence in English. Therefore, this grammatical error stems not only from differences in awareness of existence between languages, but also from different grammar expressions about existence. In addition, in Chinese, existence (there-be) and possession (have/has), are expressed and translated by the only one Chinese character ‘有’. Most teachers normally adopt “have” idea to help interlingual translation to learn EES. However, this teaching might lead to a potential difficulty for students to be aware of existential difference between English and Chinese.

Assessing introspective linguistic judgments quantitatively: the case of The Syntax of Chinese

The informal judgments of the well-formedness of phrases and sentences have long been used as the primary data source for syntacticians. In recent years, the reliability of data based on linguists’ introspective intuitions is increasingly subject to scrutiny. Although a number of studies were able to replicate a vast majority of English judgments published in a textbook and in peer-reviewed journal articles, the status of data in many non-English languages has yet to be experimentally examined. In this work, we employed formal quantitative methods to evaluate the reliability of judgments in the widely used textbook, The Syntax of Chinese (Huang et al. 2009). We first assessed example sentences based on the acceptability ratings from 148 native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Using a target forced-choice task, we further explored the potentially problematic sentence pairs. Results of the two experiments suggest an eminently successful replication of judgments in the book: out of the 557 data samples tested, only five sentence pairs require further investigation. This large-scale study represents the first attempt to replicate the judgments in a non-English syntax textbook, in hopes to bridge the gap between the informal data-collection in Chinese linguistic research and the protocols of experimental cognitive science.

Translation: Tort Liability – Section 7 – Civil Code of the People’S Republic of China

NOTE: UPDATED WE POSTED ON JUNE 10, 2020 A TRANSLATION OF THE THIRD DRAFT OF THE TORT CHAPTER OF THE PRC CIVIL CODE, WITH THE PARAGRAPH NUMBERING OF THE VERSION PASSED BY THE NPC ON MAY 28, 2020. WE OWE THANKS TO NPC OBSERVER FOR MAKING AVAILABLE THE 3RD DRAFT AND THE FINAL TEXT.THAT VERSION WAS POSTED ON CHINA LAW TRANSLATE WITH MODIFICATIONS TO CONFORM IT TO THE PASSED VERSION BY JEREMY DAUM OF YALE’S PAUL TSAI CHINA CENTER.WE HAVE NOW COMPLETED OUR TRANSLATION OF THE FINAL VERSION AS PASSED BY THE NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS.WE PLAN TO PUBLISH AT THE FORDHAM INTERNAL LAW JOURNAL ONLINE OUR TRANSLATION WITH COMMENTARY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHINA’S TORT LAW TO COINCIDE WITH THE JANUARY 1, 2021 EFFECTIVE DATE OF THE LONG AWAITED CIVIL CODE OF THE PRC. AS THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS WE PARTICULARLY WELCOME COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS - GWCTRANSLATION: TORT LIABILITY – SECTION 7 – CIVIL CODE OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINAPassed by the National People’s Congress, May 28, 2020. Effective January 1, 2121By George W. Conk, Senior Fellow, Stein Center for Law & Ethics, Fordham University School of Law, with Wenjie Lyu, LLM, Rongrong Zahang, LLM, and Haoshi Jiang, MSL Contemporary Chinese law began afresh in 1978 with the policy of “reform and opening” announced by Deng Xiao Ping, who from 1977 to 1992 was the most prominent of the Chinese leadership. After a half century of war, invasion, and revolution Deng was the architect of a policy of modernization. Universities returned to normal, and China began its rapid economic rise. Important to Deng’s program was the normalization of the legal system which had nearly collapsed.In 1986 the legislature – the National People’s Congress adopted the General Principles of Civil Law. embraced a broad swath basic principles of civil law, including liability in tort. Over the next fifteen years law schools were built and progress in the professionalization of the courts was marked as the country adopted laws that brought it into conformity with the international trade systemBut Chinese legal academic leaders traced their emerging law to Germany via Japan and Russia (then the USSR). So their aspiration was to adopt a comprehensive civil code. In 2002 a discussion draft was circulated and moved toward legislative consideration. One Section of that draft civil code dealt with tort liability. But controversy – particularly regarding the law of property – stalled consideration of the tort section of the civil code. I commented on the development of the law of tort and translated the draft code. It was published as A New Tort Code emerges in China An introduction to the discussion and a Translation of Chapter 8 - Tort Law of the Official Discussion Draft of the Proposed Revised Civil Code, 30 FORDHAM INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL 935 (2007) http://ssrn.com/abstract=1015041In 2009 the National People’s Congress passed the Tort Law as a stand-alone law. That law has been the basic framework of China’s tort law since then. But it should be recognized that causes of action are typically grounded in specific laws such as the Traffic Safety Law, the Environmental Protection Law, etc.But the basic model that China’s legal authorities have in mind is the Continental civil law best exemplified by the German Civil Code. Development of the comprehensive code progressed slowly. It was intended not to transform the civil law but to provide a foundation for the law as it was in fact being developed by the steadily advancing array of statutory law. In 2017 the first section of the Code was passed as Basic Principles. In May 2020 the National People’s Congress met during the twin crises of instability in Hong Kong and the covid19 pandemic. It passed the comprehensive civil code.o Although it made few substantive changes, the Civil Code formally abolished and replaced the elements which had previously been passed as stand-alone items. They include: o Marriage Law [婚姻法]o Inheritance Law [继承法]o General Principles of Civil Law [民法通则]o Adoption Law [收养法]o Guaranty Law [担保法]o Contracts Law [合同法]o Rights in Rem Law [物权法]o Tort Liability Law [侵权责任法]o General Provisions of Civil Law [民法总则]The reader will note that although we use the word “tort” in the title we generally abjure Anglo-American terms of art in order to more accurately capture the Chinese syntax. E.G. we would render 侵害他人承担侵权 责任 as “to bear responsibility for infringement of the rights of another”.- GWC September 20, 2020

Topic-based automatic summarization algorithm for Chinese short text.

Most current automatic summarization methods are for English texts. The distinction between words in Chinese text is large, the types of parts of speech are many and complex, and polysemy or ambiguous words appear frequently. Therefore, compared with English text, Chinese text is more difficult to extract useful feature words. Due to the complex syntax of Chinese, there are currently relatively few automatic summarization methods for Chinese text. In the past, only the important sentences in the original text can be selected and simply arranged to obtain a summary with chaotic sentences and insufficient coherence. Meanwhile, because Chinese short text usually contains more redundant information and the sentence structure is not neat, we propose a topic-based automatic summary method for Chinese short text. Firstly, a key sentence selection method is proposed combining topic words and TF-IDF to obtain the score of each text corresponding to the topic in the original text data. Then the sentence with the highest score as the topic sentence of the topic is selected. Considering that the short text of Weibo may contain a lot of irrelevant information and sometimes even lack some important components of topic, three retouching mechanisms are proposed to improve the conciseness, richness and readability of topic sentence extraction results. We validate our approach on natural disaster and social hot event datasets from Sina Weibo. The experimental results show that the polished topic summary not only reflects the exact relationship between topic sentences and natural disasters or social hot events, but also has rich semantic information. More importantly, we can almost grasp the basic elements of natural disaster or social hot event from the topic sentence, so as to help the government guide disaster relief or meet the needs of users for quickly obtaining information of social hot events.