Abstract
2014 by Yao Yao. This paper investigates the use of BA construction in Mandarin Chinese discourse with two frequently-occurring Chinese verbs fang ("v. to put") and ná ("v. to take"). Previous literature suggests that the use of BA construction is influenced by a number of factors, includ-ing semantic meaning of the verb phrase and prominence and weight of the object NP. However, what is unclear is how these factors work together in conditioning word order variation (BA vs. SVO) in real context, especially regarding the effects of object NP prominence and weight and their interaction. In this study, we explore this issue by building corpus-based statistical models for predicting the use of BA con-struction in context. Our results show that for both verbs fang and ná, the use of BA construction is sensitive to the prominence (especially givenness) and weight of the object NP as well as structural parallelism, while no interaction effects were found. Furthermore, the weight effects are in opposite directions in the two models, raising new questions regarding the nature of heavy NP shift and revealing a great degree of cross-verb differences in word order variation.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014 |
| Publisher | Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chulalongkorn University |
| Pages | 561-567 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9786165518871 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2014 |
| Event | 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014 - Cape Panwa Hotel, Phuket, Thailand Duration: 12 Dec 2014 → 14 Dec 2014 |
Conference
| Conference | 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Thailand |
| City | Phuket |
| Period | 12/12/14 → 14/12/14 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Computer Science (miscellaneous)