Jingxia Lin

• PhD (Stanford University)
• Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University

Lexical differences amongst the Mandarin Chinese varieties have been noticed and studied extensively in the past decades, but much less attention has been paid to lexical convergence. Through a survey among native Singapore Mandarin speakers for their preferences between Singapore Mandarin words and their Putonghua equivalents, this study finds tha...

本文报告温州方言中言说动词“讲”的初步考察，重点描述“讲”语法化后的分布及功能。本文发现“讲”可出现在多种语法位置，呈现出多线程语法化的特征。

This chapter offers an overview of both the linguistic background and the state of the art of NLP research on varieties of Chinese as similar languages. In addition to briefly summarizing grammatical features of Mandarin Chinese, we also underline important contrasts between Chinese dialects and varieties of Mandarin Chinese. As Chinese dialects ar...

Typological shift in lexicalizing motion events has hitherto been observed cross-linguistically. While over time, Chinese has shown a shift from a dominantly verb-framed language in Old Chinese to a strongly satellite-framed language in Modern Standard Mandarin, this study presents the Chinese dialect Wenzhou, which has taken a step further than St...

This article presents a classification and clustering based study to account for the differences among five Chinese light verbs ( congshi , gao , jiayi , jinxing , and zuo ) as well as their variations in Mainland China Mandarin (ML) and Taiwan Mandarin (TW). Based on 13 linguistic features, both competition and co-development of these light verbs...

This paper investigates the functions of the auxiliary 有 yǒu in the ‘yǒu + verb phrase’ construction using spoken Singapore Mandarin data. It finds that yǒu is not a substitute of existing markers such as 了 le and 过 guò, as suggested by previous research. Instead, based on corpora data, yǒu codes for the existential perfect, as it serves to highlig...

This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events, with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morph...

Other than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上 fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng ‘put on the table’), the postverbal position in Modern Mandarin Chinese can only be filled by limited types of adjunct locative prepositional phrases (e.g. 跳在桌子上 tiào zài zhuōzi-shàng ‘jump onto the table’). Among these postverbal adjunct locative PPs, only a small se...

Other than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上 fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng 'put on the table'), the postverbal position in Modern Mandarin Chinese can only be filled by limited types of adjunct locative prepositional phrases (e.g. 跳在桌子上 tiào zài zhuōzi-shàng 'jump onto the table'). Among these postverbal adjunct locative PPs, only a small se...

Given the historical and linguistic contexts of Singapore, it is both theoretically and practically significant to study Singapore Mandarin (SM), an important member of Global Chinese. This paper aims to present a relatively comprehensive linguistic picture of SM by overviewing current studies, particularly on the variations that distinguish SM fro...

This study investigates the extended grammatical uses of the speech act verbs Open image in new window shuō ‘say’ and Open image in new window jiǎng ‘say’ in Singapore Mandarin Chinese (SMC). With data from a contemporary spoken corpus, the study finds that while both Open image in new window and Open image in new window are major speech act verbs...

This study investigates the extended grammatical uses of the speech act verbs 说 shuo 'say' and 讲 jiang 'say' in Singapore Mandarin Chinese (SMC). With data from a contemporary spoken corpus, this study finds that while both 说 and 讲 are the major speech act verbs in SMC, 说 has been more grammatically extended than 讲 not only in SMC, but also its cou...

This paper reports the Nanyang Technological University Error Annotation Program (NTU-EA), a language error annotation program with graphic user interface. Compared with previous studies, the program is featured by being efficient, comprehensive, and flexible for error annotation of Chinese language. The results exported from the program can be rea...

Although Mandarin Chinese is shared by Chinese communities such as Mainland China,Although Mandarin Chinese is shared by Chinese communities such as Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, linguistic differences are frequently found among regional uses, ranging from pronunciation, orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. Along wit...

In this paper, we report a study of the polarity of Chinese emotion words. We conducted a large-scale polarity rating experiment with laymen speakers, and compiled a database of polarity ratings for Chinese emotion words based on these experimental results. The polarity ratings were also compared with previously reported polarity ratings, as well a...

While the study of classifiers in Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese has been discussed extensively in the literature, there are also key differences in the classifiers between Singapore Mandarin Chinese and other varieties of Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, such as Mainland China Mandarin Chinese. Yet, classifiers in Singapore Mandarin Chinese hav...

Research on Singapore Mandarin Chinese has shown that it is influenced , to a certain degree, by dialects such as Min (e.g. Hokkien) and Canton-ese. This has resulted in many differences between Mainland China Mandarin Chinese and Singapore Mandarin Chinese. This paper examines one such difference: the expression of self-agentive motion constructio...

Despite the increasing interest in emotion and sentiment analysis in Chinese text, the field lacks reliable, normative ratings of the emotional content and valence of Chinese emotion words. This paper reports the first large-scale survey of average language users' judgment of perceived emotion type (e.g., ANGER, HAPPINESS), emotional intensity, and...

This work provides an analysis of the quantitative denotations of simple adjectives (base adjectival forms) in Mandarin Chinese following recent analyses of the ‘scale structure’ associated with English adjectives. Against a widely accepted assumption that simple adjectives unitarily denote an unbounded property, we assume that the property of boun...

This paper presents the encoding of motion events in Wenzhou dialect, a branch of Wu Chinese and shows that its lexicalization patterns significantly differ from the two (satellite- and verb- framed, or three including equipollent- ly-framed) patterns that have been widely recognized in previous studies (Talmy 2000, Slobin 2004, etc.). Spe- cifical...

In this paper, we report a study of the polarity of Chinese emotion words. We conducted a large-scale polarity rating experiment with laymen speakers, and compiled a database of polarity ratings for Chinese emotion words based on these experimental results. The polarity ratings were also compared with previously reported polarity ratings, as well a...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 17th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2016, held in Singapore, Singapore, in May 2016. The 70 regular papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: lexicon and morphology, t...

Mandarin Chinese often expresses motion events with more than one verbal motion morpheme, e.g., 退 tui ‘recede’ and 回 hui ‘return’ in 退回房間裏 tui-hui fangjian-li recede-return room-inside ‘return into the room’. Building on recent work on “scale structure”, this paper proposes a “Motion Morpheme Hierarchy” that can be used to better predict the order...

Adverbial clauses are known from traditional grammar as one of three major classes of subordinate clauses. They are semantically diverse and structurally complex. In addition to modifying main clauses, adverbial clauses can also contribute to discourse cohesion. In light of recent cross-linguistic research, this article discusses adverbial clauses...

Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility and its unique distribution different from regular verbs with higher semantic content and selectional resrictions. Due to its light grammatical content, earlier natural language processing studies typically put light verbs in a stop word list and ignore...

When PRC was founded on mainland China and the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the relation between mainland China and Taiwan became a classical Cold War instance. Neither travel, visit, nor correspondences were allowed between the people until 1987, when government on both sides started to allow small number of Taiwan people with relatives in Chi...

Despite the increasing interest in studying Chinese emotion words, there has been no reliable references in the published literature on the category (e.g. happiness, anger) and intensity (e.g. low, high) of emotion words in Chinese as perceived by native speakers. This study is the first to collect and analyze average language users’ perception of...

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 242-256

A statistical comparison of Singaporean, Mainland, and Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study of sentence final particles

The term World Chineses (全球華語), though not as common as World Englishes, is becoming more and more widely used with the increasing popularity of Chinese as a second language and with the Chinese diaspora spreading and growing. The lexical variations among World Chineses are easily observed and often studied. Yet, to better understand the dynamicity...

In this study, we compared the tonal patterns of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese to the prosodic patterns of emotional speech. We used statistical methods to model the variation in tonal height and slope of tonal contour of Mandarin emotion words. Our results showed that there was indeed some similarity between the tones of Mandarin emotion words...

A language sensitive to a thing-place distinction (e. g., cup vs. Paris) may use thing-to-place conversion devices to allow a thing to be conceptualized as a place. Mandarin Chinese behaves inconsistently in the use of the conversion device - the addition of a localizer (e. g., li 'inside') to a thing noun - in that the device is not required in ev...

Two or more light verbs are sometimes found to co-occur in both Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin Chinese, e.g., jiāyǐ and jìnxíng in duì xuéshēng jiāyǐ jìnxíng yǐndǎo ‘to guide students’, and a particular ordering is often preferred, e.g., jiāyǐ jìnxíng over jìnxíng jiāyǐ. This study argues that the order of the light verbs is closely associated to two...

3 Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements (Dowty 1979, Hay et al. 1999, among others). Building on recent studies on " scale structure " (Hay et al. 1999, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010, among others). We introduce a new aspectual feature [±scale] into the traditional Ve...

Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use of locative preposition yu (於/于) in classical Chinese have been proposed. Yet there is still no agreement. This project proposed a new account via a statistical modeling method known as “recursive partitioning” to identify all the relevant factors correlated to...

Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use of locative preposition yu in classical Chinese have been proposed. Yet there is still no agreement. This project proposed a new account via a statistical modeling method known as "recursive partitioning" to identify all the relevant factors correlated to the op...

Existing treebanks of Mandarin Chinese such as the Sinica Treebank, the Harbin Institute of Technology Treebank, and the Penn Chinese Treebank, parse Chinese serial verb constructions incorrectly or inconsistently in terms of headedness, i.e. which verb to be assigned with the label of syntactic and/or semantic “head”. Aspectual markers in serial v...

Tenny (1987, 1994: 79) proposes the Single Delimiting Constraint that the event described by a verb can only be delimited once (cf. Goldberg 1991, 1995). The constraint applies the effects of delimitedness as an aspectual property to the mapping of semantics and syntax, and explains why sentences with two delimiters (e.g., *Martha wiped the table d...

This study analyzes semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin Chinese multi-morpheme motion constructions (MMMCs, e.g. zǒu-jìn fángjiān ‘walk into the room’ (lit.) ‘walk-enter room’ vs. * jìn-zǒu (lit.) ‘enter-walk’). We classify Chinese motion morphemes into four types based on recent study on “scale structure”. Then...

This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin multi-morpheme motion constructions (e.g., tui-hui recede-return). It classifies Chinese motion morphemes into three major types and proposes a "Scalar Specificity Constraint" to account for the order in multi-morpheme motion constructions. The constrai...

The creation of the Wenzhou Spoken Corpus, an online searchable corpus of a modern Chinese dialect, presents a number of challenges that are of interest to the corpus linguistic community. We review issues involved with collection of spoken data, its transcription and markup, as well as the functionality of the search tools. The transcription makes...