Traditional syntactic or semantic theories failed to provide a satistactory explanation for the unique features of non-restrictive relational clauses in people＇s daily use of English language. This paper would adopt ...Traditional syntactic or semantic theories failed to provide a satistactory explanation for the unique features of non-restrictive relational clauses in people＇s daily use of English language. This paper would adopt the theoretical framework of pragmatics and use relevance theory as well as face theory to discuss the unique pragmatic functions of non-restrictive relational clauses in English news report discourse. The three major pragmatic functions are： （1） optimizing the relevance of information; （2） seeking for the consistence with readers; and （3） avoiding imposing the author＇s opinion on readers.展开更多
Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexic...Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexicographer in compiling) the word translations from Chinese English parallel corpus. Key mechanisms in this builder system are further described, including co occurrence measure, indirection association resolution and multi word unit translation. Experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the authors’ method and the potentiality of the lexicon builder system.展开更多
Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are man...Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are many language phenomena. Firstly, most utterances are ill-formed. Secondly, ellipsis, anaphora and negation are also widely used in Chinese spoken dialogue. Determining how to extract semantic information from incomplete sentences and resolve negation, anaphora and ellipsis is crucial. SHTQS (Shanghai Transportation Query System) is an intelligent telephone-based spoken dialogue system providing information about the best route between any two sites in Shanghai. After a brief description of the system, the natural language processing is emphasized. Speech recognition sentences unavoidably contain errors. In language sequence processing procedures, these errors can be easily passed to the later parts and take on a ripple effect. To detect and recover these from errors as early as possible, language-processing strategies are specially considered. For errors resulting from divided words in speech recognition, segmentation and POS Tagging approaches that can rectify these errors are designed. Since most of the inquiry utterances are ill-formed and negation, anaphora and ellipsis are common language phenomena, the language understanding must be adequately adaptive. So, a partial syntactic parsing scheme is adopted and a chart algorithm is used. The parser is based on unification grammar. The semantic frame that extracts from the best arc set of the chart is used to represent the meaning of sentences. The negation, anaphora and ellipsis are also analyzed and corresponding processing approaches are presented. The accuracy of the language processing part is 88.39% and the testing result shows that the language processing strategies are rational and effective.展开更多
It has been debated whether preference for subject-extracted relative clauses in language processing is a universal rule, with evidence from both first and second language acquisition studies. But very few studies foc...It has been debated whether preference for subject-extracted relative clauses in language processing is a universal rule, with evidence from both first and second language acquisition studies. But very few studies focus on learners of Chinese as a second language. The current research studied Chinese subject/object-extracted relative clauses processing among the learners of Chinese as a second language by a self-paced reading experiment. The results demonstrate a faster and more accurate processing of subject-extracted relative clauses in both subject and object modifying conditions, adding more evidence to the universal preference for the subject-extracted relative clauses. Both Frequency-Based Accounts and Memory-Based Accounts are discussed related to the current findings.展开更多
The 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 ...The 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.展开更多
This study considers both comprehension and production of the English restrictive relative clauses （RC） by EFL learners in Chinese context. Different tests were employed respectively in data collection, namely a sen...This study considers both comprehension and production of the English restrictive relative clauses （RC） by EFL learners in Chinese context. Different tests were employed respectively in data collection, namely a sentence combination test and a grammaticality judgment test, aiming to test the hypotheses about the acquisition of English relative clauses. The participants were 30 first-year college students randomly selected in a university of Shanxi province. The results showed that Chinese EFL learners do not follow the orders of RC acquisition predicted by any of the three hypotheses, Parallel Function Hypothesis （PFH）, Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis （PDH）, and Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis （NPAHH）. They also showed that the participants performed better in the sentence combination test than in the grammaticality judgment test, and in both tests the easiest type of RC is O-DO, and the most difficult ones are O-OPREP and S-IO.展开更多
Research on students' avoidance in the production of English relative clauses is of vital importance, which can help researchers and teachers know better how students learn languages. However, there are only few e...Research on students' avoidance in the production of English relative clauses is of vital importance, which can help researchers and teachers know better how students learn languages. However, there are only few experimental studies on it and no consensus has been achieved. When it comes to Mainland Chinese foreign language learners, hardly any relevant research on such a phenomenon has been conducted so far. This paper has analyzed a sample of materials out of Chinese Learner English Corpus, and used sentence-completion and sentence-joining tests to investigate 37 college students' behavior on four types of relative clauses, in order to explore the relationship between their avoidance and typological markedness.展开更多
This study investigated how advanced Chinese students of English construct clause relations when construing English texts. A deconstructed text was distributed in class to 42 graduate students of linguistics, who were...This study investigated how advanced Chinese students of English construct clause relations when construing English texts. A deconstructed text was distributed in class to 42 graduate students of linguistics, who were required to organize the clauses into a conceivably good text. The result suggests that these students seemed to rely on explicit cohesive words （anaphoric references and repetitions） rather than meaning relations in text construction. They seemed to have difficulties in using cataphoric contextual information and the popular discourse pattern from general to specific. This study calls for an enhanced awareness of logico-semantic relations in teaching and learning text construction.展开更多
文摘Traditional syntactic or semantic theories failed to provide a satistactory explanation for the unique features of non-restrictive relational clauses in people＇s daily use of English language. This paper would adopt the theoretical framework of pragmatics and use relevance theory as well as face theory to discuss the unique pragmatic functions of non-restrictive relational clauses in English news report discourse. The three major pragmatic functions are： （1） optimizing the relevance of information; （2） seeking for the consistence with readers; and （3） avoiding imposing the author＇s opinion on readers.
文摘Translation lexicons are fundamental to natural language processing tasks like machine translation and cross language information retrieval. This paper presents a lexicon builder that can auto extract (or assist lexicographer in compiling) the word translations from Chinese English parallel corpus. Key mechanisms in this builder system are further described, including co occurrence measure, indirection association resolution and multi word unit translation. Experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the authors’ method and the potentiality of the lexicon builder system.
文摘Spoken dialogue systems are an active research field with wide applications. But the differences in the Chinese spoken dialogue system are not as distinct as that of English. In Chinese spoken dialogues, there are many language phenomena. Firstly, most utterances are ill-formed. Secondly, ellipsis, anaphora and negation are also widely used in Chinese spoken dialogue. Determining how to extract semantic information from incomplete sentences and resolve negation, anaphora and ellipsis is crucial. SHTQS (Shanghai Transportation Query System) is an intelligent telephone-based spoken dialogue system providing information about the best route between any two sites in Shanghai. After a brief description of the system, the natural language processing is emphasized. Speech recognition sentences unavoidably contain errors. In language sequence processing procedures, these errors can be easily passed to the later parts and take on a ripple effect. To detect and recover these from errors as early as possible, language-processing strategies are specially considered. For errors resulting from divided words in speech recognition, segmentation and POS Tagging approaches that can rectify these errors are designed. Since most of the inquiry utterances are ill-formed and negation, anaphora and ellipsis are common language phenomena, the language understanding must be adequately adaptive. So, a partial syntactic parsing scheme is adopted and a chart algorithm is used. The parser is based on unification grammar. The semantic frame that extracts from the best arc set of the chart is used to represent the meaning of sentences. The negation, anaphora and ellipsis are also analyzed and corresponding processing approaches are presented. The accuracy of the language processing part is 88.39% and the testing result shows that the language processing strategies are rational and effective.
基金supported through the National Social Science Foundation of China(13BYY072)
文摘It has been debated whether preference for subject-extracted relative clauses in language processing is a universal rule, with evidence from both first and second language acquisition studies. But very few studies focus on learners of Chinese as a second language. The current research studied Chinese subject/object-extracted relative clauses processing among the learners of Chinese as a second language by a self-paced reading experiment. The results demonstrate a faster and more accurate processing of subject-extracted relative clauses in both subject and object modifying conditions, adding more evidence to the universal preference for the subject-extracted relative clauses. Both Frequency-Based Accounts and Memory-Based Accounts are discussed related to the current findings.
基金the project of"The Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses"at the University of Arizona with No.10-0363-02supported in part by the project of Superiority Subject in Jiangsu Province(20110101)the EGI corporation for its support of this research
文摘The 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.
基金supported by the Fund Program for the Scientific Activities of Selected Returned Overseas Professionals in Shanxi Province(2013)
文摘This study considers both comprehension and production of the English restrictive relative clauses （RC） by EFL learners in Chinese context. Different tests were employed respectively in data collection, namely a sentence combination test and a grammaticality judgment test, aiming to test the hypotheses about the acquisition of English relative clauses. The participants were 30 first-year college students randomly selected in a university of Shanxi province. The results showed that Chinese EFL learners do not follow the orders of RC acquisition predicted by any of the three hypotheses, Parallel Function Hypothesis （PFH）, Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis （PDH）, and Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis （NPAHH）. They also showed that the participants performed better in the sentence combination test than in the grammaticality judgment test, and in both tests the easiest type of RC is O-DO, and the most difficult ones are O-OPREP and S-IO.
文摘Research on students' avoidance in the production of English relative clauses is of vital importance, which can help researchers and teachers know better how students learn languages. However, there are only few experimental studies on it and no consensus has been achieved. When it comes to Mainland Chinese foreign language learners, hardly any relevant research on such a phenomenon has been conducted so far. This paper has analyzed a sample of materials out of Chinese Learner English Corpus, and used sentence-completion and sentence-joining tests to investigate 37 college students' behavior on four types of relative clauses, in order to explore the relationship between their avoidance and typological markedness.
基金contributes partly to the fulfillment of a National Project of Social Science entitled:A contrastive study of minimum discourse patterns in English and Chinese, coded 10BYY006an MOE project A contrastive study of clause relations and discourse patterns in English and Chinese, coded 08JA740013
文摘This study investigated how advanced Chinese students of English construct clause relations when construing English texts. A deconstructed text was distributed in class to 42 graduate students of linguistics, who were required to organize the clauses into a conceivably good text. The result suggests that these students seemed to rely on explicit cohesive words （anaphoric references and repetitions） rather than meaning relations in text construction. They seemed to have difficulties in using cataphoric contextual information and the popular discourse pattern from general to specific. This study calls for an enhanced awareness of logico-semantic relations in teaching and learning text construction.
