In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chines... more In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese are intrinsically unaccusative as assumed in the literature. The fact that some transitive non-passivized verbs can undergo locative inversion is argued to be the result of morphological operations rather than the result of transitive alternation (cf. Cheng 1989). One such operation — that involving the morpheme zhe — is described here; I claim that it deletes the agent role of a verb if certain conditions are met, and allows the verb in question to satisfy the conditions on locative inversion (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989). I also argue that the zhe operation is not a variant of the passive operation, but a morphological operation in its own right.
Machine translation (MT) is aimed to enable a computer to transfer nat-ural language utterances i... more Machine translation (MT) is aimed to enable a computer to transfer nat-ural language utterances in either text or speech from one language into another while preserving the meaning and interpretation. MT technology has gone through several paradigms from its very ...
This paper explores various factors involved in the resolution of zero anaphora in Chinese discou... more This paper explores various factors involved in the resolution of zero anaphora in Chinese discourse. Our study differs from previous ones in distinguishing three types of utterances and using clauses as the unit of resolution. The hierarchical structures of utterances enable us to process inter- and intra-utterance anaphora uniformly. Experimental results show that (1) clauses function significantly better than sentences as the unit of resolution, providing an improvement of precision from 36.0% to 63.4%; (2) the inclusion of cataphors and the use of NP forms as a criterion in Cf ranking do not lead to significant improvement of precision; and (3) when assigning antecedents to more than one zero pronoun in the same utterance, the criterion based on grammatical functions gives rise to better performance than that with linear orders.
In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chines... more In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese are intrinsically unaccusative as assumed in the literature. The fact that some transitive non-passivized verbs can undergo locative inversion is argued to be the result of morphological operations rather than the result of transitive alternation (cf. Cheng 1989). One such operation — that involving the morpheme zhe — is described here; I claim that it deletes the agent role of a verb if certain conditions are met, and allows the verb in question to satisfy the conditions on locative inversion (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989). I also argue that the zhe operation is not a variant of the passive operation, but a morphological operation in its own right.
Machine translation (MT) is aimed to enable a computer to transfer nat-ural language utterances i... more Machine translation (MT) is aimed to enable a computer to transfer nat-ural language utterances in either text or speech from one language into another while preserving the meaning and interpretation. MT technology has gone through several paradigms from its very ...
This paper explores various factors involved in the resolution of zero anaphora in Chinese discou... more This paper explores various factors involved in the resolution of zero anaphora in Chinese discourse. Our study differs from previous ones in distinguishing three types of utterances and using clauses as the unit of resolution. The hierarchical structures of utterances enable us to process inter- and intra-utterance anaphora uniformly. Experimental results show that (1) clauses function significantly better than sentences as the unit of resolution, providing an improvement of precision from 36.0% to 63.4%; (2) the inclusion of cataphors and the use of NP forms as a criterion in Cf ranking do not lead to significant improvement of precision; and (3) when assigning antecedents to more than one zero pronoun in the same utterance, the criterion based on grammatical functions gives rise to better performance than that with linear orders.
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