Chinese Clauses Research Articles

E-C Translation Strategies for Long and Complex Sentences in Evidence-based Medicine Texts

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the translation strategies for long complex sentences (LCS) found in Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) texts. The study identifies four main approaches to translating such sentences in English-to-Chinese (E-C) EBM translation. Firstly, relative words can either be omitted or replaced with antecedents or pronouns. Secondly, parallel structures can be preserved in the translated sentence or rendered as compound-complex sentences in Chinese. Thirdly, nominalization structures can be transformed into equivalent clauses in Chinese. Finally, passive voice structures can be translated as passive voice sentences in Chinese or transformed into active voice sentences. The authors hope that these translation strategies will serve as valuable references for other translators.

The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learners

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the target language). Results of an oral production task and two online acceptability judgment tasks indicated that resumption does not transfer from the native language, and that Chinese learners of European Portuguese employ movement structures to produce and process relative clauses. Additionally, results showed that resumptive pronouns do not rescue or ameliorate ungrammatical extractions from islands, contrary to what is traditionally assumed in grammatical theory. This finding was kept constant across participants, native and non-native. Overall, we conclude that second language speakers are able to select and reassemble movement features in their non-native language and use similar processing mechanisms as native speakers to analyse island configurations.

A systemic functional study of modal verbs in the Chinese clause

Abstract Previous studies of Chinese modal verbs in the traditional framework (e.g. Lu 2004; Peng 2007; Tang 2000; Tiee 1985; Tsang 1981; Xie 2002; Xu 2007) have mainly focused on the description of semantic and syntactic features of modals that occur in the middle of the clause and attached little significance to the functions that modal verbs serve when they appear at different positions in the clause. Similarly, in a systemic functional framework, modal verbs in the middle of the clause receive the most attention. Their interpersonal functions are thoroughly explored; however, their textual functions are seldom discussed as they are believed to mainly appear in the middle of the clause buried in the Rheme rather than at the beginning or at the end of the clause. This paper examines the functions that modal verbs serve when they occur in different places in the clause from the perspective of systemic functional grammar. It argues that modal verbs are functionally motivated and the position of the modal verbs in the clause expresses particular meanings. When situated medially in the clause, modal verbs function as the Modality in the interpersonal structure of the clause, and as part of the Rheme in the thematic structure of the clause, marking the transition between Theme and Rheme. When occurring at the beginning or in the middle of the clause before a nominal group, some modal verbs of obligation serve as focus markers and identify the subsequent nominal group as the marked information focus of the clause. In the thematic structure of the clause, clause-initial modal verbs of obligation and probability function as interpersonal Themes to foreground the speaker’s modal assessment. Finally, when placed at the end of the clause, modal verbs serve either as the Predicator or Modality in the interpersonal structure of the clause and as the unmarked information focus of the clause.

The Interpretation of Null Subjects in a Radical Pro-drop Language: Topic Chains and Discourse-semantic Requirements in Chinese

Abstract Based on original data collected through an online experiment, evidence is provided in this paper that the interpretation of null subjects in a radical pro-drop language like Chinese relies on the topic criterion proposed for consistent and partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli 2007 and Frascarelli 2018), thereby supporting the theory that the null subject parameter implies an information-structural strategy for interpretation. Nevertheless, radical Chinese shows specificities that must be integrated in this theory for a comprehensive account. In particular, even though silent topic can start chains (consistent with the topic criterion), data show a significant preference for overt and local topics as antecedents. This locality requirement thus integrates phonological visibility in a general syntactic condition (minimal overt link condition), proposing an interesting parallel with the properties shown by partial pro-drop languages (Frascarelli and Jimenez-Fernandez in press). The present investigation also contributes to outline the structural differences existing between adverbial clauses in Chinese, supporting a distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses (Haegeman 2012). Specifically, while temporal and conditional clauses show the properties of nonrestrictive relative clauses, this is not the case for concessive clauses, which merged as subordinate clauses in either the C-domain or the high split-TP area. Differences between temporal and conditional clauses are attributed to the presence of an overt operator in the latter, and the pre-matrix position of adverbial clauses is explained in the light of their discourse role as frame-setters (Krifka 2007).

Ancient–Modern Chinese Translation with a New Large Training Dataset

Ancient Chinese brings the wisdom and spirit culture of the Chinese nation. Automatic translation from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese helps to inherit and carry forward the quintessence of the ancients. However, the lack of large-scale parallel corpus limits the study of machine translation in ancient–modern Chinese. In this article, we propose an ancient–modern Chinese clause alignment approach based on the characteristics of these two languages. This method combines both lexical-based information and statistical-based information, which achieves 94.2 F1-score on our manual annotation Test set. We use this method to create a new large-scale ancient–modern Chinese parallel corpus that contains 1.24M bilingual pairs. To our best knowledge, this is the first large high-quality ancient–modern Chinese dataset. Furthermore, we analyzed and compared the performance of the SMT and various NMT models on this dataset and provided a strong baseline for this task.

Impersonal clauses in Chinese

This article deals with impersonal clauses in Chinese (ICiCs) (e.g. Táishàng chàngzhe xì, 台上唱着戏). These are called pseudo-existentials in the literature, as they resemble typical existentials both in form and in meaning. I argue that ICiCs are impersonal, ergatively oriented, and existential. They are impersonal in that the actor of the process is typically demoted to the end position or completely omitted; ergatively oriented in that they express the meaning of happening instead of doing, and existential in that they present the existence of events with reference to some location realized by the initial locative nominal group. These three semantic aspects are in tune with each other and are realized by the structure NGL ^ VG ^ NG, in which VG ^ NG constitutes the event, whose existence is expressed through its configuration with the initial NGL.

A Systemic Functional Framework for Chinese Analysis

This paper attempts to develop a framework for the functional analysis of Chinese within the theoretical background of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). It focuses its discussion on the controversial issues emerged from previous Chinese studies, aiming to provide new insights into these uncertainties. Given that the terminology in SFG is originally created for the analysis of English, the key terms in the framework are defined by examining their functions in the linguistic environment of Chinese to prevent any distortion of the characteristics in the language. The framework consists of the systematic descriptions of Chinese clauses in experiential, interpersonal, and textual dimensions. The descriptions end up by proposing the realization statements for Transitivity, Theme and Mood systems in Chinese. The framework also includes the descriptions of grammatical categories above and below clause in Chinese. In particular, the grammatical structures of clause complex and various types of group/phrase are examined for this purpose.

Processing Relative Clauses in Chinese: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

AbstractThe Interpretation of Chinese relative clauses has become of significant interest in sentence processing research, since some studies found that Chinese comprehension patterns violate the well-known universal subject relatives preference proposed by NAPH theory and proved by cross-linguistic studies. The current study uses the neuropsychological measure of ERP. It supports such a language-specific phenomenon, with the results showing that both subject-and object-modifying subject relatives eliciting larger ERP components than object relatives. The results suggest that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives at both modifying positions, challenging the claim of universal subject preference for all languages. In addition, this study casts doubts on CWO and working memory-based DLT models despite results being compatible with them, and concludes that none of the current models are comprehensive enough to account for the data. Finally, this study offers a piece of evidence for the garden path effect caused by the surface NVN word order in the Chinese relative clause. All in all, this study adds to the evidence that processing preference is not universal. It contributes to a comprehensive model of how complex structures are processed.

Processing relative clauses in Chinese: Commentary on paper by F. Hsiao and E. Gibson

Processing relative clauses in Chinese: Commentary on paper by F. Hsiao and E. Gibson

Word Sense Disambiguation for Chinese Based on Semantics Calculation

In order to use semantics more effectively in natural language processing, a word sense disambiguation method for Chinese based on semantics calculation was proposed. The word sense disambiguation for a Chinese clause could be achieved by solving the semantic model of the natural language; each step of the word sense disambiguation process was discussed in detail; and the computational complexity of the word sense disambiguation process was analyzed. Finally, some experiments were finished to verify the effectiveness of the method.

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject- and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage.

A corpus-linguistic study of multiple relative clauses in Chinese

Abstract This study investigates the ordering restriction of two relative clauses modifying the same head noun phrase in Chinese. We use both retrospective and corpus data to challenge Larson and Takahashi's (2007) account of the ordering of such multiple relative clauses in Chinese in terms of the distinction of individual-level and stage-level relative clauses. Instead, we offer an account based on the discourse function of the multiple relative clauses in Chinese. Specifically, we argue that relative clauses that serve to provide grounding information for the head noun tend to precede other types of relative clauses. The proposed ordering restriction is shown to account for the ordering of multiple relative clauses in both Chinese and English.

Finiteness of Clauses and Raising of Arguments in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract. This paper argues that Mandarin Chinese clauses exhibit the finite/nonfinite contrast, and, based on this discovery, shows that the EPP is the driving force for A‐movement. The evidence is the raising of arguments from the TP complements of different kinds of modals. It is argued that the epistemic modals in Mandarin Chinese take a finite TP complement, whereas the modal hui‘will’ and the root modals take a nonfinite TP complement. Though the epistemic modals take a finite TP complement, they nonetheless permit subject‐to‐subject raising. This phenomenon can be accounted for if we assume that the EPP drives A‐movement, and agreement blocks it. Mandarin Chinese does not have grammatical features; as a consequence, the subject of a finite clause does not perform checking of grammatical features, and thus is free to raise. This phenomenon, therefore, is evidence against the checking‐based theory of A‐movement. If feature checking is involved in raising in Mandarin Chinese sentences, extra assumptions must be made, with a heavy burden of proof on the checking‐based theory.

The Information Structure of Adverbial Clauses in Chinese Discourse

This study investigated adverbial clauses in spoken as well as written Chinese discourse. The adverbial clauses in the spoken data were categorized into (ⅰ) initial clauses that occur in the initial position with respect to their linked material across continuing intonation, (ⅱ) final clauses that occur in the final position with respect to their linked material across continuing intonation, and (ⅲ) final clauses that occur in the final position with respect to their linked material across final intonation. Those in the written data were classified into (ⅰ) initial and (ⅱ) final clauses that occur in the initial or final position, respectively, with respect to their main clauses. An analysis of the spoken and written data shows that the temporal, conditional, and concessive clauses tend to occur before their linked material/main clause, but that the causal clauses are quite different from the other adverbial clauses. Specifically, the causal clauses commonly appear in the final position with respect to their associated material in the spoken data, while the initial and final causal clauses are nearly evenly distributed in the written data. The data suggest that temporal, conditional, and concessive clauses, like topics, are presupposed parts of their sentences; i.e., all of them may be thought of as establishing frameworks for the interpretation of propositions that follow, which seem to be prototypically textual in their functioning. By contrast, causal clauses in Chinese are noticeably distinct from other adverbial clauses not only in spoken data, but also in written data; they play interactional as well as textual roles in discourse linking.

Processing relative clauses in Chinese

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are more complex than subject-extracted structures. A key word-order difference between Chinese and other Subject-Verb-Object languages is that Chinese relative clauses precede their head nouns. Because of this word order difference, the results follow from a resource-based theory of sentence complexity, according to which there is a storage cost associated with predicting syntactic heads in order to form a grammatical sentence. The results are also consistent with a theory according to which people have less difficulty processing embedded clauses whose word order matches the word order in main clauses. Some corpus analyses of Chinese texts provide results that constrain the classes of possible frequency-based theories. Critically, these results demonstrate that there is nothing intrinsically easy about extracting from subject position: depending on the word order in the main clause and in a relative clause, extraction from object position can be easier to process in some circumstances.

Is there a finite vs. nonfinite distinction in Chinese?

Some special devices are designed to test the existence of the finiteness of a Chinese clause, though Chinese evidently fails to meet the general conditions on finiteness. These tests include the occurrence of aspectual markers and modals as AUX in finite but not in nonfinite clauses, the obligatory nullness of the subject of the nonfinite clause (Huang 1988 [1982], 1984, 1987, 1989), the cooccurrence constraint, and the licensing of negative polarity items (Y.-H. A. Li 1985, 1990), as well as C.-C. Tang's (1990) criteria, which are not much discussed in the literature. In this paper we make a careful study of all these criteria specially devised for Chinese and find that none of them can make a valid distinction between finiteness and nonfiniteness. Since, as far as we know, there is no independent evidence to support such a distinction, we conclude that it in fact does not exist in Chinese.

Formal shifts in English‐Chinese translation

There are two types of formal shifts in English‐Chinese translation: (a) shifts within the same rank and (b) shifts across ranks. This study of translation shifts is based upon the scale of ranks in systemic‐functional grammar as expounded by Catford (1965). Its purpose is to find out major types of formal shifts in English‐Chinese translation. Attempts to set up governing principles on shifts in word classes at the rank of ‐word yield few convincing results, because Chinese words are less formally distinctive than English words. Accordingly, in this article, shifts in word classes are studied at a higher rank. The ranks of phrase and clause provide deeper insights into the mechanisms of English‐Chinese translation. In Chinese, subject‐predicate phrases and verb phrases are not formally distinctive rom clauses. The distinction between a phrase and a clause is only a matter of placement. This simple nature of Chinese determines the unique role of the phrase in the structuring process of the Chinese text When rendered into Chinese, an English phrase may have either a Chinese clause or a Chinese phrase as its counterpart. The English clause is subject‐prominent and the Chinese clause topic‐prominent So, translation at the rank of clause is the reconstruction of a formal structure into a semantic structure. In this article this is termed ‘deformalization’. Moreover, an English clause is also a potential Chinese phrase, depending on the placement of its Chinese counterpart The rank of sentence is actually a conglomeration of clauses in certain logical patterns. A reshuffling of logical relations and a deduction of the number of connectives are major trends in English‐Chinese translation. This is called ‘paratacti‐calization.’ In English‐Chinese translation, the phrase is the structuring unit and the clause and the phrase are the destructuring units.

INDIRECT ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN CHINESE

Indirect adverbial clauses are clauses with a conditional form that do not seem to give conditions, clauses with a temporal form that do not seem to indicate the time etc. For instance, the indirect conditional If you're hungry, there's food in the fridge differs semantically from the direct conditional If you're hungry, I'll give you something to eat. A similar distinction is found in Chinese. This paper examines indirect adverbial clauses in Chinese in light of what we already know about Western languages. In order to show that the patterns described are not simply results of Westernized grammar, the material from modern Chinese is supplied with example sentences from the 18th century novel Hongloumeng.

Indirect adverbial clauses in chinese

Indirect adverbial clauses in chinese

INTERFERENCE AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

This paper reports the findings of a study of the acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portuguese by first and second year students of these languages with English as their first language. Various structures were tested with the aim of separating the features of interlanguage which may be attributed to first language interference from those which may be explained as being universal to second language acquisition. Among these structures were use of resumptive pronouns in the relative clause, deletion of relativizers, stranding of prepositions, deletion of prepositions, and piedpiping structures. In line with the work of Gass and Ard (1980) and Hyltenstam (1981), the present paper examines the explanatory value of the accessibility hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977) as applied to the ease or difficulty of the acquisition of relativization of various syntactic types, and expands this study by including data from the acquisition of relative clause types not examined in previous works. Also tested were structures involving different strategies for the parsing and recognition of relative clauses, in order to determine which are employed most frequently and most successfully by second language learners, and structures with correct and incorrect deletion of prepositions, in order to see whether the loss of information involved would be a constraining factor.