Lexical-functional grammar analysis of Chines
中国语言词汇功能语法分析
Edited by Adams B. Bodomo and LUKE Kang Kwang 宝翱潼，陆镜光主编
Abstract 摘要
This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics is a collection of selected papers from two workshops on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) Analysis of Chinese organized at the University of Hong Kong in 2001 and 2002. All but one of the papers appearing in this volume were read at one or the other of the two workshops. The themes of the workshops addressed the need to explore ways in which some aspects of the structure of Chinese may be analyzed in LFG or related constraint-based grammar formalisms. We will first point out some salient features of the Chinese language and outline some possible questions and implications that these might have for LFG. We will then summarize the various papers that appear in this volume, pointing to the issues that are being discussed and the solutions that are proposed.
Article 文章
Abstract 摘要
In this paper, four-inversion construction in Mandarin Chinese, including locative inversion, dative shift, resultative inversion, and domain inversion, are accounted for within a simplified lexical mapping theory (LMT). The simplified LMT differs from the conventional LMT in several respects. First, it allows a-structure roles to be unspecified, underspecified, or fully specified for syntactic function assignment. Second, a single unified mapping principle replaces previous multiple mapping principles and well-formedness conditions. Inversion may be induced by a language-specific morphosyntatic operation that affects only the syntactic assignment of argument roles to grammatical functions, as in locative inversion and dative shift. Or, it may be the consequence of a morpholexical operation that creates a composite role and thus also the competition for syntactic function assignment between its two composing roles, as in resultative inversion and domain inversion.
Abstract 摘要
This paper examines the subject condition in LFG using data from Cantonese. The subject condition states that every predicator must have a subject (Bresnan 2001). Cantonese, like other Chinese dialects, has grammatical properties, which lead to difficulties for morphological as well as structural functional specification. It is a pro-drop language, but unlike other pro-drop languages such as Italian and Spanish, it exhibits little verbal morphology. At the same time it is a topic prominent language which lacks clear-cut word order criteria that can be called upon in the identification of subjects. We first document four kinds of sentences in which the subject is not explicitly present. We then illustrate how implicit subjects can be identified through a detailed analysis of a connected text. On the basis of this, it is proposed that in order to handle functional specifications satisfactorily in Cantonese, the lexical mapping theory be augmented by pragmatic-discourse criteria including information from the immediate speech situation and discourse topics. In this way, the universality of the subject condition can be maintained.
Abstract 摘要
This paper is a study of reciprocal verbs in Mandarin, which are derived by replacing one syllable of the verb stem with the reciprocal prefix hu ‘RCP’, the first syllable of the reciprocal adverbial huxiang ‘mutually’. A reciprocal verb can either reduce or retain the valence of its verb stem. It reduces the valence of its verb stem by binding off one of the arguments of its verb stem. This kind of reciprocal verb is called a Valence-Reduced (VR) reciprocal verb. A reciprocal verb retains the valence of its verb stem by inducing a binding relation between the subject of the reciprocal verb and its other argument. The reciprocal verbal prefix hu is argued to be responsible for the valence reduction/retention of reciprocal verbs. The Thematic Role Hierarchy is argued to determine which argument of the verb stem of a reciprocal verb is bound off or anaphorically bound. Lexical-Mapping Theory is used to mark the bound argument of the verb stem. A lexical binding rule binds this bound argument with the highest thematic role on the argument structure to form a composite thematic role. This is how a VR reduces the valence of its verb stem. For a VI to retain the valence of its verb stem, a syntactic binding rule marks the highest thematic role on the argument structure with ANT(ECEDENT) and the bound argument with ANA(PUOR). All of the arguments on the argument structure are mapped to grammatical functions (GFs). The Inside-out Functional Uncertainty determines exactly which GF can be anaphorically bound.
Abstract 摘要
This paper discusses the function COMP in the taxonomy of grammatical functions in LFG. It first points out some possible problems for previous proposals for the elimination of COMP and then argues for its existence in the structure of Cantonese. Initial results show that Cantonese is indeed an OBJ/COMP mixed language on the score that there is an alternation of NP OBJs and COMPs in the complementation properties of some predicates. The fact that Cantonese does not meet many of the other criteria for mixed languages, such as coordination, passivization, unbounded dependency, and complementation of nouns, adjectives and prepositions, however, suggests that the concept of mixed languages should be extended to include degrees or extents to which a language can be regarded as a mixed language. In this wise, languages that behave like Cantonese should be treated as marginal mixed languages while languages like English that fulfill many of the tests outlined should be treated as elaborate mixed languages. This analysis supports a finer-grained categorization of grammatical functions in theories of grammar.
Abstract 摘要
This paper focuses on the development of constraints towards a characterization of the serial verb construct. Based on earlier works such as Bodomo (1997, 1998), a number of constraints on verb serialization are critically reviewed with respect to Cantonese. The analysis draws from a corpus of more than 20 paradigmatic sets of sentences in Cantonese. These were collected from written sources, such as magazines, and spoken sources, including face-to-face communication and TV and radio broadcasts (Lam 2001). A set of constraints that characterize verb serialization as a syntactico-semantic construct in Cantonese is developed. These constraints include the following: (a) the subject sameness constraint, (b) the aspect and polarity constraint, (c) the connector constraint, (d) the Predicate constraint, (e) the modal auxiliary constraint, and (f) the XCOMP constraint. These constraints are also believed to be commensurate with certain Lexical-Functional Grammatical (LFG) assumptions of predicates and clauses.
Abstract 摘要
LFG has been widely used to analyze the English language as well as other languages from a purely linguistic point of view. A relatively new direction in the LFG research field is applying it to language computation, ranging from parsing to machine translation. The LFG-based work in Chinese computing is still rather rare. This paper addresses two aspects of the current framework of LFG in terms of its application to the processing of Chinese: it is quite powerful for linguistic representation, even very sophisticated sentential constructions in Chinese can be explained by LFG easily, but it seems not strong enough for Chinese computation –the main weakness is on the computation of semantics. However, it is evident that it is semantic analysis, rather than syntactic analysis, which plays a dominant role in analyzing Chinese sentences. Consequently, the paper suggests some possible augmentation on the framework of LFG: (1) representing semantic constraints in a systematic way; (2) building up the semantic knowledge base to make inference on the augmented framework possible; (3) incorporating statistics into the LFG formalism; and (4) augmenting the operation of unification to fit the statistical computation.
Abstract 摘要
This paper shows that the binding properties exhibited by Chinese compound reflexives like ‘ta-ziji’ (s/he-self) can be best explained if an Optimality-Theoretic (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993) account of reflexivization is adopted. It claims that Prominence and Locality are the two important factors that regulate the interpretation of reflexives in different languages and their different rankings can account for the difference between English and Chinese (PC) in reflexive binding. This paper argues that in Chinese, Prominence Constraint (PC) is ranked higher than Locality Constraint (LC), whereas in English, LC is ranked higher than PC.
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