Hai hua Pan

• BA (HUST), MA (Wuhan), Ph.D (Texas)
• Professor (Full) at Chinese University of Hong Kong

The goal of this paper is to propose a unified account for both moved and base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese. It is well known that, besides moved topics (or, instance topics in Chen's (1996) terminology), Mandarin Chinese also has base-generated topics, i.e., the so-called dangling topics in the literature, or Chinese-style topics (Chafe, 1...

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the blocking effect observed in long-distance (LD) bound bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese. Unlike the symmetrical unlikeperson blocking claimed in the literature (Huang & Tang 1991, Xue, Pollard, and Sag 1994), this chapter argues that (a) the blocking effect of ziji is not symmetrical: first and second pe...

The relationship between a reflexive and its antecedent is characterized by (a) a locality condition, and (b) a syntactic prominence condition. In Chomsky (1981) locality is defined in terms of governing category , and syntactic prominence is via c-command . In this article I show that, to account for the long-distance binding properties of complex...

This article divides “yidu一度” into “yidu1” and “yidu2”, and compares the semantic differences among cengjing曾经, “yidu1” and “yidu2” based on three parameters: relatively distant past, time interval and extremum. Cengjing indicates that an associated event or state was true at some point or during a specific time period in the relatively distant pas...

Psycholinguistic studies of focus processing have yielded varying results regarding how focus affects language processing. We report the results of an event-related potential (ERP) experiment that used question-answer pairs in a discourse to manipulate whether a target word was contextually focused, contrastively focused, contextually defocused, or...

抽象 本文從焦點–重音匹配的角度來探討漢語日常口語中「把」字句謂語部分的複雜性。本文認為，與一般 [PP V] 結構不同，「把」字句是為了在句子層面上把位於「把」NP 後的謂語部分處理為資訊焦點而產生的一種特殊句式，而實現為資訊焦點的必要條件就是必須得到句法結構提供的核心重音。由於「把」字句中「把」後 NP 是謂語動詞的論元，其後的謂語部分只有在句法上形成分支結構才能夠得到核心重音，僅僅在韻律上形成分支結構是不夠的，因此光杆動詞和不形成句法分支的雙音節動詞都被排除在「把」字句之外。這個觀點也適用於其他動詞在尾的結構，例如被動句和「連…都」結構等。

Cheng and Huang (1996) argue that both unselective binding and E-type pronoun strategies are necessary for the interpretation of natural language sentences and claim that there exists a correspondence between two sentence types in Chinese and the two strategies, namely that the interpretation of the “wh … wh” construction (which they call “bare con...

Although the intra-sentential functions of the Mandarin bei passive construction have been well studied, its inter-sentential function has not been well understood yet. In this paper, from a Centering Theory perspective, we demonstrate that the bei passive also bears inter-sentential weights. Specifically, the function of the pre-bei semantic entit...

In this short report, we show that some elements usually deemed as obligatory DE SE anaphors may be interpreted as NON-DE SE in certain contexts. We argue that this non-de se reading cannot be subsumed under the category of DE RE, and suggest extending Kuno and Kaburaki's THEORY OF EMPATHY (Kuno & Kaburaki 1977, Kuno 1987) to interpret these readin...

With the assumption that long distance anaphors (LDAs) are unsaturated positions, Giorgi (Nat. Lang. Linguist. Theory 24:1009–1047, 2006, Linguist. Inq. 38(2):321–342, 2007) argues that the machinery independently needed for temporal anchoring—i.e., the syntactic representation of the coordinate of the bearer-of-attitude and that of the speaker—can...

This article argues that the agent position of bei must be occupied by a syntactic entity-overt or covert-by examining the backward-looking centers (Cb) and center transitions in Chinese discourse segments containing bei-utterances using Centering Theory. We show that discourse segments with overt or zero objects of bei all prefer center continuati...

First Edition: 1998 Revised Edition: 2005 (first impression), 2013 (second impression)

This paper discusses issues related to VP -Ellipsis and null object constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It consists of two parts. First, pace Li (1998), I argue that it is not true that no null object construction (NOC) sentences can be analyzed as VP -ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese, and I will show that the fact that the interpretation patterns of th...

Previous analyses consider the Cantonese sentence-final particle tim ‘add’ as being like English “too” and “also” and/or “even”. In this paper, we argue that tim is like none of the above, as it is a non-restricted additive particle which exhibits the following properties: (a) it does not rely on the extreme ends of the scale, (b) it is not sensiti...

Traditionally, the relation between a topic and its comment in Chinese is characterized by an aboutness condition (Chao 1968; Chafe 1976; Li and Thompson 1981; Xu and Langendoen 1985), though the precise nature of aboutness has never been made clear In this article, we attempt to provide a more explicit characterization of the aboutness condition b...

This paper investigates the semantics of the adverbial ge based on Lin (1998). Although we agree with Lin that ge should be treated as a distributor, our analysis is different from his in the following aspects. First, the pairing function is from the sorting key to the whole distributive share not just to the quantity indicated by the distributive...

In this paper we use data from the Chinese existential you-construction, the closest counterpart to the English there-construction, to show that the existential construction can be used to mark not only a new entity, but also a new relation. When it marks a new relation, the referent of the postverbal NP is not required to be a new entity. Based up...

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...

In this paper we report on our recent work in clause alignment for English-Chinese legal texts using available lexical resources including a bilingual legal glossary and a bilingual dictionary, for the purpose of acquiring examples at various linguistic levels for example-based machine translation. We present our formulation of an appropriate measu...

In our study, sentences are represented as sequences of critical fragments, and critical fragments with more than one distinct resolution found in the training corpus are considered as being ambiguous. Different from other studies, the ambiguous critical fragments are disambiguated using an example-based system in our study. The contexts, i.e. the...

It is claimed in the literature that the perfective marker -guo has the following semantic properties: discontinuity, repeatability/reversibility, and partiality, which contrast with the continuation and totality properties of the perfective marker -le. Previous analyses adopt a purely semantic approach to account for the above properties of -guo a...

this article, we will give an overview of the EBMT technology. In the next section we will review the history of EBMT, with a focus on the main ideas. Since a comprehensive review of EBMT can be found in Somers (2000a), we will focus on the discussion of our viewpoints of the EBMT framework. Then we will define the notion of example and examine the...

Just like other NLP applications, a serious problem with Chinese word segmentation lies in the ambiguities involved. Disambiguation methods fall into different categories, e.g., rule-based, statistical-based and example-based approaches, each of which may involve a variety of machine learning techniques. In this paper we report our current progress...

this article I will investigate the relationship between adverbs of quantification and perfective aspect with special reference to Chinese. In English adverbial quantifiers like often can co-occur with perfectives. Although in Chinese adverbial quantifiers like zongshi `always' pattern with English adverbial quantifiers (they can co-occur with the...

Some special devices are designed to test the existence of the finiteness of a Chinese clause, though Chinese evidently fails to meet the general condi- tions on finiteness. These tests include the occurrence of aspectual markers and modals as AUX in finite but not in nonfinite clauses, the obligatory nullness of the subject of the nonfinite clause...

The Chinese negation marker bu 'not' is analyzed as a clitic-like element in the literature (Huang 1988; Ernst 1995; etc.) in order to explain why it cannot co-occur with (i) the perfective marker -le or (ii) manner phrases in the V-de construction. Huang (1988) assumes that bu must cliticize onto auxiliaries/modals or the following verb, and since...

This paper describes the properties of the split noun phrases (NPs) in Chinese, and shows that there exists an asymmetry between adjunct + head noun cases and complement + head noun cases, though the asymmetry disappears if either a classifier is added to the relevant cases, or the moved head noun is adjacent to its associated part at syntax or LF;...

An approximate word-matching algorithm for Chinese is presented. Based on this algorithm, an effective approach to Chinese spelling error detection and correction is implemented. With a word tri-gram language model, the optimal string is searched from all possible derivation of the input sentence using operations of character substitution, insertio...

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 (Mei 1986; Huang 1987; Li 1990; Tan 1991; Gu 1992) and the fact that some transitive non-passivized verbs can undergo locative inversion is the result of morphological operations rather than...

this article I will investigate the relationship between adverbs of quantification and perfective aspect with special reference to Chinese. In English adverbial quantifiers like

this paper I will investigate the interaction between adverbial quantification and perfective aspect with special reference to Chinese. In English perfectives can co-occur with adverbial quantifiers like often, but in Chinese the perfective marker -le cannot. However, the perfective in Chinese can co-occur with adverbial quantifiers if either some...

In this paper, we introduce the familiar notion of type in logical semantics and demonstrate how type information of lexical items can be exploited to generate, analyze, and interpret Chinese sentences. The implications of this approach to computational processing of Chinese are also briefly explored.

This paper defines a selective set of semantic notions of noun phrases and explores their lexical realisation in Mandarin Chinese. A metalanguage L is constructed to facilitate the definitions. The novel aspect of L is the incorporation into the set of model-theoretic concepts two pragmatic notions, speaker ground and common ground, formalised in...

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....

Thesis (Ph. D)--University of Texas at Austin, 1995. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-268).

This paper reports on our recent work in clause alignment for English-Chinese legal texts using available bilingual lexical resources, for the purpose of acquiring examples at various linguistic levels for EBMT. It formulates similarity measures for candidate clause pairs in terms of matched lexical items and presents the implementation of a clause...

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...

This paper proposes a syntax-information structure interface account to the object- taking intransitive constructions in Chinese. On the basis of an analysis assumed in Huang (1990) and Wang (1965), we propose that there is an abstract verb, represented as HAVE, in the relevant constructions. We argue that this abstract verb can be realized as eith...

Language models adopted by most existing error detection and correction approaches of Chinese text are N-Gram models of character, word or POS tag. Their deficiencies are that only local language constraints are employed and there is no language model unification process. A multifeature-based automatic error detection and correction approach is pre...

In this paper we will investigate the centering theory proposed by Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein (1995) (henceforth GJW) and revised in Walker, Joshi, and Prince (1998) (henceforth WJP), and argue that their theory needs to be further extended and revised. We show that the centering theory proposed by GJW and WJP would make wrong predictions about th...