Modern Chinese Parts Of Speech

Classification of parts of speech in Chinese is tough due to the lack of morphological differences, and thus is short of in-depth investigation and exploration. Based on the analysis and research of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book elaborates on the system of Chinese parts of speech and proposes a set of criteria on their classification, contributing to relevant theoretical and methodological studies. To begin with, it examines the common characteristics and internal hierarchies of parts of speech, as well as the relationship between grammatical functions and parts of speech in modern Chinese. Then it puts forward the criteria on the classification of Chinese parts of speech, with a descriptive explanation of around 20 parts of speech. Besides, it illustrates the statistical studies on Chinese parts of speech, offering data support and corpus verification to the criteria. Also, it analyses the system of Chinese parts of speech from the perspective of typology. Specifically, it elucidates the correspondence between syntactic positions and parts of speech, functional differentiation of Chinese word items, etc. This book will be a valuable reference to researchers and students in Chinese linguistics. Learners of Chinese will also be attracted by it.

What is the essence of a part of speech? Why is it difficult to classify parts of speech? What are the bases and criteria for classifying them? How should they be classified? In doing so, how should a conversional word be dealt with? How should nomonalization be treated? These are just some of the questions answered in this book. The classification of parts of speech in Chinese is a tough job due to the language's lack of morphological differences. Based on the analysis of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book proposes that, essentially, a part of speech is not of distributional type and that its intrinsic basis is an expressional function and the semantic type. Essentially, large categories such as substantive words, predicate words and modification words are classes of words classified according to their expressional functions. Basic categories such as nouns, verbs and adjectives are classes that combine semantic types with syntactical functions. In classifying parts of speech, the book pays attention not to identifying a single distributive characteristic that is internally universal and externally exclusive but to clustering the grammatical functions that have the same classification value through the “reflection-representation” relationship among distribution, expressional function and semantic type (distribution reflects expressional function and semantic type, which are, in turn, represented as distribution), thereby identifying the classification criteria. It uses distributional compatibility and the correlation principle to analyze which distributional differences represent differences in parts of speech and which do not. In this way, grammatical functions that have equal classification values are collected into one equivalent function cluster, each of which represents one part of speech. The book uses four strategies to classify parts of speech, namely the homogeneity strategy, the homomorphical strategy, the priority homomorphical strategy and the consolidation strategy. It will be a valuable reference for Chinese linguistic researchers and students as well as Chinese learners.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

This monograph is a translation of two seminal works on corpus-based studies of Mandarin Chinese words and parts of speech. The original books were published as two pioneering technical reports by Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing group (CKIP) at Academia Sinica in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Since then, the standard and PoS tagset proposed in the CKIP report have become the de facto standard in Chinese corpora and computational linguistics, in particular in the context of traditional Chinese texts. This new translation represents and develops the principles and theories originating from these pioneering works. The results can be applied to numerous fields; Chinese syntax and semantics, lexicography, machine translation and other language engineering bound applications. Suitable for graduate and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese, Mandarin Chinese Words and Parts of Speech provides a comprehensive survey of the issues around wordhood and PoS. Chapter 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and the appendixes V-VII of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

This book offers a comprehensive survey of the major parts of speech in Mandarin. Seeking to identify the sets of universal and language-specific categories, it compares the range of categories available in Mandarin and the Indo-European languages and establishes six universal categories – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions – and three language-specific ones, namely classifiers, localizers and sentence-final particles. Incorporating insights from recent research findings and the diachronic development of the language, the book sheds new light on the factors that contribute to the long-standing debate on the categorical status of adjectives, prepositions and localizers in the extant literature. Bringing together the earlier general descriptions and the latest advances, it is broadly accessible to non-native and native speakers of the language and offers an ideal reference source for all students and scholars who are interested in studying the parts of speech in Mandarin.

Centring on "words" which connect vocabulary and semantic morphemes, this book makes a systemic and in-depth analysis on the study of modern Chinese lexicology. Firstly, it clarifies the definitions and properties of vocabulary, words and semantic morphemes in Chinese. Then the structure forms of Chinese words are examined. It is worth noting that this research is one of the first to distinguish word formation and lexical morphology. It observes that word formation studies how neologisms are coined, while lexical morphology refers to the ways in which semantic morphemes are combined with each other. On word meaning and its clustering, it discusses the relationship between word meaning and concept, as well as the criteria and principles of the clustering. Specifically, it studies monosemes, polysemes, synonyms, near-synonyms, antonyms, etc., including their characteristics and types. Lastly, it explores the evolution of word meaning and its laws, as well as the dynamic form of vocabulary. This book will be a valuable reference for scholars and students in linguistics, especially in Chinese lexical studies.

This book constitutes carefully reviewed and revised selected papers from the 13th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2012, held in Wuhan, China, in July 2012. The 67 full papers and 17 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: applications on natural language processing; corpus linguistics; lexical computation; lexical resources; lexical semantics; new methods for lexical semantics; and other topics.