How to ask questions in Mandarin Chinese

This thesis re-examines the four main question-types in Mandarin Chinese, namely, particle questions, háishì questions, A-not-A questions and wh-questions, whose previous accounts are argued to be unsatisfactory due to various faulty assumptions about questions, particularly the stipulation of `Q\u27. Each of the four Mandarin Chinese question-types is re-accounted based on the view that questions are speech-acts, whose performance are done by way of speakers\u27 subconscious choice of sentence-types that mirror their ignorance-types, as proposed in Fiengo (2007). It is further demonstrated that viewing questions as speech-acts instead of a structurally marked sentence-type allows a simpler and more intuitive account for expressions that occur in them. Two expressions are re-evaluated for that matter: the sentential adverb dàodi in Mandarin Chinese and wh-the-hell in English

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Research on Reasoning and Modeling of Solving Mathematics Situation Word Problems of Primary Schools

[[abstract]]This research developed a web-based reasoning of mathematical situation word problems using the natural language processing technology. Our system provided the steps of morphological analysis, syntax analysis, semantic analysis and rule judgment to infer the semantic structure and operational structure of situation word problems. It also adopted the language of MathML and SVG to provide the web-based illustration of solving procedure in mathematical situation word problems. Keywords: situation word problem; natural language processing; MathML; SVG

Indefinite pronouns

This book is a comprehensive cross-linguistic study of indefinite pronouns ('someone', 'anything', 'nobody') in the world's languages. The PDF file deposited here is the manuscript version submitted to the publisher. The final published book is available in open access at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198235606.001.0001/oso-9780198235606

Issues on topics

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with