Chinese Noun Research Articles

Chinese nouns are mass nouns: An information-theoretic computational proof

The mass–count distinction in Mandarin Chinese has been heatedly debated in linguistics. Previous research investigated the mass–count distinction primarily through qualitative methods. Our study applied mutual information and created three variation conditions to explore the relationship between Chinese nouns and the individuation function of classifiers. Furthermore, we examined the mass–count distinction by quantitatively analyzing 1,000 instances of Num–CL–N (numeral–classifier–noun) structures. The computational results indicate that the individuation function of classifiers is influenced by noun homogeneity. Moreover, we argue that Chinese nouns exhibit an inclination for homogeneity and the deep semantic processing of nouns is similar to classes or sets, providing evidence for the broad mass noun hypothesis and the collective-name hypothesis in the philosophy of language.

A Comparative Analysis of the Combinatorial Properties of Chinese Measure Words and Arabic Classifiers

This comparative analysis investigates the combinatorial properties of Chinese noun measure words and Arabic classifiers exploring their semantic syntactic and cultural aspects. Chinese measure words are integral to quantifying nouns exhibiting diverse semantic alignments and syntactic patterns. In contrast, Arabic classifiers fulfill a similar role but with distinct structural variations influenced by grammatical gender and number agreement. By juxtaposing these linguistic elements, this study unveils both commonalities and disparities, offering insights into the intricate ways languages encode quantification. Through this comparative examination, we gain a nuanced understanding of linguistic diversity and cultural nuances inherent in Chinese and Arabic, enriching our comprehension of language structure and cross-linguistic communication.

Multi-modal Chinese Text Emotion Metaphor Computation Based on Mutual Information and Information Entropy

Metaphor is to express another thing through one thing, it is not only a rhetorical means, but also embodies a kind of analogical cognition and way of thinking of people. In recent years, metaphors have made more and more progress in Chinese language recognition, so their status has gradually risen. Chinese language sentiment analysis is a relatively difficult problem in language processing. Chinese language semantics is ambiguous and complex, so it is a great challenge to construct Chinese Emotion structure. In this paper, Chinese nouns and Chinese verbs are used as test samples to conduct metaphor test calculation. The test results of mutual information and information entropy show that for the sample metaphor calculation, the correct rate of individual words is less than 70%. The ratio between the macro-average of gerund words and the baseline fluctuates relatively large. The metaphor recognition of nouns is about 20% higher than the original test results and about 10% higher for verbs. It shows that under the action of mutual information and information entropy, the metaphor recognition performance of the basic structure of Chinese Emotion constructed from the perspective of metaphor is improved, and further illustrates the feasibility of mutual information and information entropy algorithm for building the basic structure.

The Evolutional Development of Nouns in Middle Chinese Grammar

Middle Chinese witnessed the existence of a large number of new grammatical constituents, some of which had already been developed in the mid and late Old Chinese language before thriving in middle ancient times. Among these, the syntactic functions of nouns in Middle Chinese were in the process of evolutional development. The paper aims to investigate the nature of noun evolution by analyzing the exemplified data. It is found that nouns in Middle Chinese grammar mainly serve as subjects, objects, and attributes, though their direct link with predicates became less frequent due to the extensive usage of the copula of shì是 (be). The development of nouns mainly consisted of prefixes and suffixes, such as the prefix ā阿, which emerged with its crucial evolutional features.

The Role of Lăo老in the Noun Evolution in Middle Chinese Grammar

The paper is to examine Chinese noun evolution by means of Lăo老in Middle Chinese Grammar. In this context, Lăo老 is introduced firstly which constitutes notional words instead of prefixes. Then, related examples are given and analyzed in accordance with their constituent role. It is found that lăo老 became a prefix after the Six Dynasties, which is articulated with five concrete contexts of its usage. The roles of lăo老 act as evolutional features of noun in Middle Chinese grammar.

The representation of noun-verb distinction in left posterior middle temporal gyrus: evidence from representation similarity analyses.

Nouns and verbs are fundamental grammatical building blocks of languages. A key question is whether and where the noun-verb division was represented in the brain. Previous studies mainly used univariate analyses to examine this issue. However, the interpretation of activated brain regions in univariate analyses may be confounded with general cognitive processing and/or confounding variables. We addressed these limitations by using partial representation similarity analysis (RSA) of Chinese nouns and verbs with different levels of imageability. Participants were asked to complete the 1-back grammatical class probe (GCP; an explicit measure) and the 1-back word probe (WP; an implicit measure) tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. RSA results showed that the activation pattern in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LpMTG) was significantly correlated with the grammatical class representational dissimilarity matrix in the GCP task after eliminating the potential confounding variables. Moreover, the LpMTG did not overlap with the frontal-parietal regions that were activated by verbs vs. nouns or the task effect (CRP vs. WP) in univariate analyses. These results highlight the role of LpMTG in distinguishing nouns from verbs rather than general cognitive processing.

Study on Morphological Motivation on English and Chinese Noun Derivatives: Taking American National Geographic and Chinese National Geography as Examples

Linguistic motivation remains an important theoretical issue in language research. Lexical motivation, as the most basic level of linguistic motivation, has always been a hot-discussed topic in the study of motivation, but there is little study on the comparison of lexical motivation between English and Chinese, especially on noun derivatives. Therefore, this article, using corpus research and qualitative analysis, aims at finding, describing, and explaining the similarities and differences between English and Chinese noun derivatives in morphological motivation. The corpus, selected by the principle of authority, equivalence, timeliness and feasibility, is built on American National Geographic and Chinese National Geography on which a few researchers delve from the perspective of motivation, so it is worthy of more exploration. Theoretically, this study will explain the inherent laws of language and promote the further development of linguistic motivation theory. Practically, this study may improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and learning.

Syntactic differences of the probabilistic valency of nouns in Chinese–English Code-switching

Based on a Chinese–English code-switching (CS) treebank, this study analyzes the probabilistic valency of nouns for the holistic examination of the syntactic features and functions of Chinese and English nouns in CS. It shows that: (1) Chinese or English nouns mainly head four types of monolingual or mixed syntactic relationsrespectively, among which attributives make up the biggest share. (2) Chinese or English nouns as dependents are mainly involved in six types of monolingual or mixed syntactic relationsrespectively. With Chinese noun dependents, objects and subjects are the top dependencies in monolingual and mixed dependencies, respectively. With English noun dependents, attributives and objects are the top dependencies in monolingual and mixed dependencies respectively. (3) Syntactic differences are found in dependency distance. Specifically, all mixed dependencies present longer mean dependence distances than the corresponding monolingual dependencies, except for dependencies headed by Chinese nouns. (4) The major causes for syntactic differences are syntactic transference, syntactic convergence, differences in placements of adverbials or attributives between Chinese and English, and switched chunks. These findings indicate that syntactic differences between Chinese and English nouns in CS are a consequence of language contact. However, their “specific” syntactic functions are still constrained by the grammar involved in CS.

卡片教学法对加油汉语补习班小学一年级学生掌握汉语名词的影响 PENGARUH PENGGUNAAN FLASHCARD TERHADAP PENGUASAAN KATA BENDA PADA SISWA DI KURSUS MANDARIN JIAYOU

The study aims to find out whether the application of visual learning media in the form of flash cards either has a significant or no effect on the mastery of Chinese nouns in students in the Jiayou Mandarin Course. The research design used is a quantitative research design. The data collection technique used is in the form of a test which amounts to 20 questions with data processing techniques for reliability testing, normality testing, homogeneity testing, and hypothesis testing. The results of the calculation of the reliability test with KR20 obtained a value of 0.710 which means the reliability criteria are high, the Lilliefors Normality Test in the pre-test data for class I-A is 0.198 and class I-C is 0.094 at a significant level = 0.05 of 0.220 which means the data is normally distributed. Homogeneity test of the two data groups with the F test obtained a value of 1.01 at a significant level = 0.05 of 2.48 which means the data is homogeneous. Hypothesis Testing with t-test obtained a value of 7.795. Then the t table obtained at the significant level = 0.05 is 2.131. From these two values, it is found that thitung > ttabel (7.795 > 2.131). So, it can be concluded that H0 is rejected and Ha is accepted, which means that there is a significant influence between flash card media on noun mastery in class I-SD students of the Jiayou Mandarin Course in Medan. Keywords: influence, use, flash card, mastery, noun, Jiayou mandarin course.

Spontaneous quantitative processing in Chinese singular and plural picture naming: An event-related potentials analysis.

Chinese nouns lack inflection and cannot reflect the quantitative relationship between singular and plural numbers. However, neural processes of picture naming are different from those of words. We assume that Chinese single and plural picture naming is different, and they may involve quantitative processing. Therefore, Experiment 1 was designed by picking picture naming as the task and Chinese as the target language and compared the accuracy, reaction time, and event-related potentials (ERPs) between single and plural picture naming, where two types of pictures were mixed. Although the T-test showed no significant differences in behavioral data, there were differences in ERPs. ERP differences involved two effects: P1 of 160–180 ms and P2 of 220–260 ms in the parietal-occipital lobe. These differences are suggested to reflect the neural differences in quantitative processing. Therefore, Chinese singular and plural picture naming consists of word production and implicit quantitative processing simultaneously. To explore the relationship between the two processings, we added a semantic factor (inanimate vs. animate items) to the quantity factor of Experiment 1 and carried out Experiment 2, with the observation indexes unchanged. There were no significant differences in behavioral data among the four conditions. After variance analysis, ERPs results indicated an interaction between semantic and quantitative factors in the central area at 180–280 ms. In summary, we suggest that Chinese singular and plural picture naming includes two simultaneous neural processing tasks: word production and quantitative processing, which interact in the central area at 180–280 ms.

What is the opposite of Henduo ‘many’ in Mandarin?

Abstract This article first studies the contrastive properties of Q-adjectives many and few, as well as henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ in Mandarin from the perspective of their strengths as determiners (Milsark, 1974 & 1977). Although all falling into the weak-determiner category for being existential and indefinite, many/henduo show more properties as leaning towards strong definiteness and universal quantification than few/henshao. Secondly, because of the kind-demoting mass NP nature of Chinese nouns and the fact that Mandarin is a topic-comment pro-drop language, henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ can appear both in the pre-nominal attributive and the predicative positions, unlike their English counterparts many and few that cannot be used as predicates due to the token-denoting nature of English nouns and that English is not a pro-drop language. I also argue that the determiner strengths demonstrated by Q-adjectives are not related to indefinite specificity.

Contrastive Study of Brain Activation Regions during Verb Production in Uyghur and Chinese Broca Aphasia Patients after Stroke

<bold>Objective</bold> Blood oxygenation level dependent-functional magnetic resonance image (Bold-fMRI) was used to compare the brain activation of Uyghur and Chinese broca aphasia patients during verb production task, exploring the neural mechanism of verb production, in order to provide basis for the evaluation and treatment of Uyghur and Chinese broca aphasia patients. <bold>Methods</bold> A total of thirty-one patients with broca aphasia who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were selected, including 15 patients in the Uyghur patient group and 16 patients among the Chinese patient group. Thirty-six healthy volunteers were recruited and matched with the patients in the ethnicity, sex, age and years of education, with 18 in each group. Language function was evaluated by Uyghur and Chinese standard aphasia test. Using Uyghur and Chinese nouns as basic experimental materials, Bold-fMRI data were collected when subjects performed the verb production task. SPM 8.0 software was used for statistical analysis, language and aphasia factors were used for double factor variance analysis to compare the interaction at the whole brain level of the four groups. Simple effect analysis was performed in the brain regions with significant interaction, and the differences in brain activation were compared between the two groups. <bold>Results</bold> In terms of language functions, there were no significant differences in repetition, naming, listening and understanding, reading, writing scores and BDAE grading between the Uyghur and Chinese patient groups ( <italic>P</italic>&gt;0.05). The four groups showed significant interaction in the activation of bilateral lateral occipital lobe, middle frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, superior temporal gyrus and fronto-orbital gyrus; there were statistically significant differences in activation intensity of bilateral middle frontal gyrus between the Uyghur healthy group and patient group ( <italic>P</italic>&lt;0.05), but there were no statistically significant differences in activation intensity of precentral gyrus and left lateral occipital lobe ( <italic>P</italic>&gt;0.05). There were statistically significant differences in activation intensity of precentral gyrus and left lateral occipital lobe between the Chinese healthy group and patient group ( <italic>P</italic>&lt;0.05), while there were no statistically significant differences in activation intensity of bilateral middle frontal gyrus ( <italic>P</italic>&gt;0.05). There were no statistically significant differences in simple effect comparison between the Uyghur healthy group and Chinese healthy group, or the Uyghur patient group and Chinese patient group ( <italic>P</italic>&gt;0.05). <bold>Conclusion</bold> Language type and aphasia both affect neural mechanism of brain verb production; the left middle frontal gyrus may play an important role in morphological processing of Uyghur verbs; the precentral gyrus may be involved in phonetic coding output of Chinese.

Sensorimotor norms for Chinese nouns and their relationship with orthographic and semantic variables

ABSTRACT Sensorimotor information is vital to the conceptual representation of our knowledge system. This study collects perceptual and action ratings for 664 disyllabic nouns among 438 native speakers and creates the first and largest dataset of sensorimotor norms for nouns in Chinese. Using aggregated semantic covariates, including concreteness ratings from a concreteness rating study, as well as the reaction times and error rates from a lexical decision study, our current work demonstrates the strengths of sensory modalities and action effectors in Chinese nouns and explores the contributions of embodied experiences in reflecting orthographic representations and semantic processing in the Chinese language. This study contributes valuable data sources to the study of Chinese lexical processing and highlights the importance of sensorimotor information and embodied manifestations in the semantic representations of concepts. Our results also support the language universal that orthographic awareness in lexical processing and reading supersedes phonological awareness.

Plausibility and Syntactic Reanalysis in Processing Novel Noun-noun Combinations During Chinese Reading: Evidence From Native and Non-native Speakers

ABSTRACT We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore how native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) and high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners (Experiment 2) on-line process 4-character novel noun-noun combinations in Chinese. In each pair of nominal phrases (Numeral+Classifier+Noun1+Noun2), the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 varied (plausible vs. implausible) while the whole nominal phrases were always plausible. Results showed that the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 associations had an immediate effect on Noun1, and a reversed effect on Noun2 for both groups of participants. These findings indicated that plausibility plays an immediate role in incremental semantic integration during on-line processing of Chinese. Similar to native Chinese speakers, high-proficiency L2ers can also use the plausibility information of classifier-noun associations in syntactic reanalysis.

Local versus long-distance bound implicit arguments of inalienable relational nouns in Chinese

This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (KNs, e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (BPNs, e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between KNs, BPNs, locally and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of BPNs must be locally bound, whereas that of KNs can either be locally or long-distance bound. We conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to locally and long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. We analyze this difference in connection with binding theory and a theory of logophoricity. We argue that the implicit argument of BPNs is a locally bound anaphor and cannot be used as a logophor, whereas that of KNs can, supporting a proposal that the logophoric property leads to long-distance binding, as argued by Huang &amp; Liu’s (2001) for reflexives in Mandarin Chinese.

Open Relation Extraction for Chinese Noun Phrases

Relation Extraction (RE) aims at harvesting relational facts from texts. A majority of existing research targets at knowledge acquisition from sentences, where subject-verb-object structures are usually treated as the signals of existence of relations. In contrast, relational facts expressed within noun phrases are highly implicit. Previous works mostly relies on human-compiled assertions and textual patterns in English to address noun phrase-based RE. For Chinese, the corresponding task is non-trivial because Chinese is a highly analytic language with flexible expressions. Additionally, noun phrases tend to be incomplete in grammatical structures, where clear mentions of predicates are often missing. In this article, we present an unsupervised Noun Phrase-based Open RE system for the Chinese language (NPORE), which employs a three-layer data-driven architecture. The system contains three components, i.e., Modifier-sensitive Phrase Segmenter, Candidate Relation Generator and Missing Relation Predicate Detector. It integrates with a graph clique mining algorithm to chunk Chinese noun phrases, considering how relations are expressed. We further propose a probabilistic method with knowledge priors and a hypergraph-based random walk process to detect missing relation predicates. Experiments over Chinese Wikipedia show NPORE outperforms state-of-the-art, capable of extracting 55.2 percent more relations than the most competitive baseline, with a comparable precision at 95.4 percent.

ANALISIS PERBANDINGAN KATA BANTU BILANGAN INDIVIDUAL BAHASA MANDARIN DENGAN KATA BANTU BILANGAN INDIVIDUAL BAHASA INDONESIA

The number of Chinese noun quantifiers is very rich, and the usage is very complicated. Different nouns have different matching quantifiers. This situation makes Indonesian students prone to errors when learning quantifiers. Therefore, this article tries to compare Chinese individual noun quantifiers with Indonesian corresponding individual noun quantifiers. This article compares and analyzes one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one individual noun quantifiers and finds the similarities and differences between Chinese and Indonesian individual noun quantifiers.

Efektivitas Pembelajaran dengan Menggunakan Model Kamus Kata Penggolong Bahasa Mandarin Berbasis Nomina Alfabetis dalam Bahasa Indonesia

Since the annulment of Presidential Instruction No. 14/1967, which prohibits the celebration of Chinese New Year and Chinese culture in Indonesia, there has been a gradual increase in Indonesian interest in Chinese culture, including learning Mandarin. And with the increasingly tight trade relations between China and Indonesia, the need for human resources who can communicate well, especially oral communication, increases. Mandarin learners in Indonesia are not limited to those who came from Chinese ethnic, but also come from non-Chinese ethnicities. The need for literacy materials for learning Mandarin is getting higher, this is needed to help the process of learning Mandarin language. This research used quantitative research methods with questionnaire data collection techniques. Respondents of this study were undergraduate students of Chinese Literature at Maranatha Christian University Bandung, class of 2019/2020. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of learning Chinese noun classifier words by using a Chinese noun classifier dictionary model based on alphabetical nouns in Indonesian.

Electrophysiological evidence for the coexistence of expectancy fulfillment and semantic integration during the processing of binding and compound nouns

This study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate the processes of expectancy fulfillment and semantic integration during the processing of binding and compound nouns in Chinese. Sequential expectancy and cloze probability between the two constituents of a two-character noun were manipulated in two experiments, resulting in four types of target characters (i.e., the final characters of two-character nouns): (i) high-cloze, binding character (HB); (ii) high-cloze, compound character (HC); (iii) low-cloze, binding character (LB); (iv) low-cloze, compound character (LC). Participants were asked to judge as quickly and accurately as possible whether the two characters, presented sequentially, formed a real word. The two experiments varied in stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the initial and the target characters: 1000 ms and 300 ms. ERPs acquired at the target characters revealed a significant semantic integration effect in both experiments whereby low-cloze target characters elicited more negative-going activities than high-cloze target characters (L > H) with both long and short SOAs. Importantly, there was a graded N400 effect (LC = LB > HC > HB) at the central region: a clearly visible positive deflection for HB relative to HC in synchrony with an equivalence in negativity for LB and LC. This graded pattern was observed with an SOA of 1000 ms but not 300 ms. These results are discussed in terms of the possible coexistence of an expectancy fulfillment mechanism indexed by the P300 that monitors incoming information for realization of expectancies based on stored mental representations and a semantic integration mechanism indexed by the N400 that incorporates incoming information into the preceding context based on semantic-pragmatic knowledge. Manifestation of this coexistence appears sensitive to SOA-modulated attention orientation.

Наиболее распространенные виды ошибок китайских студентов при обучении русскому языку как иностранному

This article analyzes the various types of mistakes that Chinese students who come to study to Russia make. Since the improvement of the students’ speech culture and literacy is one of the main challenges that a teacher of Russian as a foreign language faces, it is necessary to carefully differentiate, distinguish and combat all possible sorts and kinds of errors Chinese students make while studying. Unfortunately, most students’ language competence is too low for a fullfledged academic activity. They find it difficult to communicate in the Russian language, to work with the educational material, to write, listen to, perceive, and then to reproduce the lecture material. The Chinese language is fundamentally different from the Russian language, for example, Chinese nouns are not marked for gender, number, or case. And when learning Russian, students face rules and language norms, which they find very difficult not only to understand, but also to apply in practice. Observations and years of experience of teaching Chinese students prove that the mistakes, they make in the process of learning Russian, are quite similar. Therefore, the article attempts to consider, analyze and organize possible cases of violation of all language norms of the Russian language.