Abstract
Dative variation is a widely observed syntactic phenomenon in world languages (e.g. I gave John a book and I gave a book to John). It has been shown that which surface form will be used in a dative sentence is not a completely random choice, rather, it is conditioned by a wide range of linguistic factors. Previous work by Bresnan and colleagues adopted a statistical modeling approach to investigate the probabilistic trends in English dative alternation. In this paper, we report a similar study on Mandarin Chinese. We further developed Bresnan et al.'s models to suit the complexity of the Chinese data. Our models effectively explain away a large proportion of the variation in the data, and unveil some interesting probabilistic features of Chinese grammar. Among other things, we show that Chinese dative variation is sensitive to heavy NP shift in both left and right directions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Coling 2010 - 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference |
| Pages | 1236-1244 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2010 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2010 - Beijing, China Duration: 23 Aug 2010 → 27 Aug 2010 |
Conference
| Conference | 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2010 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | China |
| City | Beijing |
| Period | 23/08/10 → 27/08/10 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Computational Theory and Mathematics
- Linguistics and Language