Endurant vs Perdurant: Ontological Motivation for Language Variations

30th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2016, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 28-30 October 2016Modern ontology focuses on the shared structure of knowledge representation and sheds light on underling motivations of human conceptual structure. This paper addresses the issue of whether ontological structures are linguistically represented, and whether such conceptual underpinning of linguistic representation may motivate language variations. Integrating our recent work showing that the most fundamental endurant vs. perdurant ontological dichotomy is grammaticalized in Chinese and on comparable corpus based studies of variations of Chinese, I will explore the possibilit ENGLy that this basic conceptual dichotomy may in fact provide the motivation of changes of perspectives that underlies language variations. I will also discuss possible implication this approach has in accounting for other language changes and variations such as light verb's argument taking, incorporation, loss of case/agreement, and English -er/-ee asymmetry. In the process, the will resolve three linguistic puzzles and eventually show that the endurant/perdurant dichotomy may in fact be the conceptual basis of the hitherto undefined +N (i.e. nouny) vs. +V (i.e. verby) features prevalent in linguistics. Based on this proposal, the variations involving various types of denominalization and deverbalization can be accounted for.Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperbcw

A Preliminary Semantic Corpus-Based Study on the Classifier 架 ( jià ) and Its Implications for Teaching Chinese Classifiers

In this pilot study, diachronic semantic analysis is employed to probe the origin and semantic evolution of the classifier 架 ( jià ). The study aims to achieve three objectives. Firstly, it intends to probe the emergence and development of the Chinese classifier 架 ( jià ). Secondly, it seeks to attest to the perspective of the fundamental role of human cognition and perception in the classifier language system, as indicated by Tai and Wang (1990). Finally, it suggests pragmatic classifiers teaching approaches in alignment with cognitive linguistic perceptions. The preliminary analysis of this study signifies that the classifier 架 ( jià ) is not an arbitrary linguistic device. Instead, its utilization throughout history reflects human categorization in reliance on the perceptual property of the supporting framework of the referents. To improve the efficiency of teaching Chinese classifiers and provide learners with a more natural and comprehensive acquisition mode, future studies on classifier acquisition are expected to align with the conceptual structure of the classifiers' domains and the cognitive linguistic approach

Resultatives and Unaccusatives: A Parametric View

This paper capitalizes on two peculiar properties of Mandarin Chinese resultative constructions that pose problems for a general theory of argument structure and parametric theory: (a) the widespread existence of unergative objectless resultatives, and (b) the possibility for both unaccusatives and unergatives to be causativized. It is proposed that these properties are reduced to the single possibility in Chinese (but not in English) for an unergative verb to merge as a manner modifier of an inchoative eventuality predicate BECOME in event structure. This parametric property is in turn reduced to a property of Chinese as a language of high analyticity. In opposition to certain recent models, the paper argues for the existence of a syntax-lexicon macro-parameter.Linguistic

A Study of Chinese Language Acquisition: Chinese L2 of (Morpho)-Syntax and Lexemes

This study analyzes two groups of young adult native English speakers of L2 Chinese. One group consisted of beginner level students and the second group was comprised of intermediate/advanced level students. Both groups were administered acceptability tasks in three linguistic areas: syntax, morphosyntax, and semantics. It was hypothesized that students at the beginning level would have good mastery of measure words and semantic differences of lexemes (ren shi 认识and zhi dao 知道 and ke yi 可以, hui 会, neng 能), some mastery of syntax, and little to no mastery of aspectual markers le 了and guo 过. It was hypothesized that students at the intermediate/advanced level would have strong mastery of measure words, lexemes, and syntax, and partial mastery of le and guo. Both groups’ answers were compared to those of a native speaker control group. It was found that English speakers in both the beginner and intermediate/advanced groups comparatively had greater mastery of syntax and measure words (morphosyntax) while they both struggled with le and guo aspectual marker structures. Additionally, in this study lexemes had the greatest amount of variation in all groups. It is hoped that this kind of research will help shed light on what linguistic areas are more difficult for native English speakers to learn, therefore helping scholars devise more effect teaching methods for these topics

Leveraging writing systems changes for deep learning based Chinese affective analysis

Affective analysis of social media text is in great demand. Online text written in Chinese communities often contains mixed scripts including major text written in Chinese, an ideograph-based writing system, and minor text using Latin letters, an alphabet-based writing system. This phenomenon is referred to as writing systems changes (WSCs). Past studies have shown that WSCs often reflect unfiltered immediate affections. However, the use of WSCs poses more challenges in Natural Language Processing tasks because WSCs can break the syntax of the major text. In this work, we present our work to use WSCs as an effective feature in a hybrid deep learning model with attention network. The WSCs scripts are first identified by their encoding range. Then, the document representation of the text is learned through a Long Short-Term Memory model and the minor text is learned by a separate Convolution Neural Network model. To further highlight the WSCs components, an attention mechanism is adopted to re-weight the feature vector before the classification layer. Experiments show that the proposed hybrid deep learning method which better incorporates WSCs features can further improve performance compared to the state-of-the-art classification models. The experimental result indicates that WSCs can serve as effective information in affective analysis of the social media text

Tone Sandhi Phenomena In Taiwan Southern Min

This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule. The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a near- or complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing direct- and indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework

What English-speaking Learners of Chinese Don’t Know about Dou: -- A Study on the Acquisition of ‘都’

This is the author's final draft. Published version may be obtained at http://clta-us.org

Typological variation across Sinitic languages

Decades of works dedicated to the description of (previously) lesser-known Sinitic languages have effectively dispelled the common myth that these languages share a single “universal Chinese grammar”. Yet, the underlying cause of their grammatical variation is still a matter for debate. This thesis focuses on the typological variation across Sinitic varieties. Through comparing the typological profiles of various Sinitic languages with those of their non-Sinitic neighbors, we discuss to what extent the variation within the Sinitic branch can be attributed to areal diffusion. Variation across Sinitic is often explained from the perspective of language contact – sandwiched between Altaic languages to its north and Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) languages to its south, Sinitic can be considered typologically intermediate between these two groups of languages, where Northern Sinitic shows signs of convergence towards Altaic languages and Southern Sinitic towards MSEA languages. For example, the northern varieties tend to have a smaller number of classifiers, tones and codas, as well as a stronger tendency to disyllabicity and head-final constructions. However, the notion of “Altaicization” (Hashimoto 1976) is a moot point. Despite the typological differences between Northern Sinitic and Southern Sinitic, as Bennet (1979) argues, there is little evidence for “Altaicization” as many of such differences can hardly be put down to Altaic influence; instead, they are more likely due to the typological convergence between Southern Sinitic and MSEA languages. Moreover, there is evidence that the typological variation across Sinitic cannot be amply explained by areal influence from non-Sinitic languages. Some Sinitic varieties are known to exhibit certain distinct typological characteristics. For instance, analyzing the disposal, passive, and comparative constructions across the Sinitic branch, Chappell (2015b) argues that there are no fewer than five principal linguistic areas in China. Taking into account over 350 language varieties of seven different genetic affiliations (Sinitic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic) and 30 linguistic features, we conduct a typological survey with the aid of the phylogenetic program NeighborNet (Bryant & Moulton 2004). Our results suggest that convergence towards their non-Sinitic neighbors has indeed played a pivotal role in the typological diversity of Sinitic languages. Based primarily on their degree of Altaic/MSEA influence, the Sinitic varieties in our database are classified into four areal groups, namely 1) Northern, 2) Transitional, 3) Central Southeastern, 4) Far Southern. This classification scheme reflects the intricate interplay between areal convergence, regional innovations, and retention of archaic features. The findings suggest that contact-induced typological change can occur rather rapidly, especially if given the appropriate sociolinguistic conditions. Furthermore, this thesis highlights the interdependence between the meticulous analysis of qualitative linguistic data and the proper application of quantitative tools in typological studies. Although this study is chiefly concerned with Sinitic typology, the quantitative approach adopted herein can potentially help shed new light on the challenge of typological comparison in other areas