Yu-Yin Hsu

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

How various types of focus differ with respect to exhaustivity has been a topic of enduring interest in language studies. However, most of the theoretical work explicating such associations has done so cross-linguistically, and little research has been done on how people process and respond to them during language comprehension. This study therefor...

This paper reports on two speech-production experiments focused on Putonghua and Taiwan Mandarin sentence-final particles and wh-phrases that have interrogative or indefinite readings in three contexts: yes/no questions, wh-questions, and statements. Sentence-final particles were found to influence focus-prosody through right-edge shortening and lo...

Drawing on existing research with a holistic stance toward multimodal meaning-making, this paper takes an analytic approach to integrating eye-tracking data to study the perception and use of multimodality by teachers and learners. To illustrate this approach, we analyse two webconference tutoring sessions from a telecollaborative project involving...

Eye-tracking data in Chinese languages present unique challenges due to the non-alphabetic and unspaced nature of the Chinese writing systems. This paper introduces the first deeply-annotated joint Mandarin-Cantonese eye-tracking dataset, from which we achieve a unified eye-tracking prediction system for both language varieties. In addition to the...

This paper presents several new empirical observations regarding some interpretive effects and structural restrictions of modals that occur in sentence-initial positions in Chinese. It provides a new analysis of sentence-initial modal sentences in terms of the overt head-movement of a modal to the sentence periphery to value strong focus features a...

This study compares the processing of cleft structures against that of monoclausal sentences using event-related potential (ERP). We aim to understand how syntactic complexity is processed by comparing the neural response to cleft and single-clause sentences with identical verb phrases, controlling for verb bias frequency effects. Sixty participant...

Phonotacticon is a cross-linguistic database that contains syllabic phonotactic information about spoken lects (linguistic varieties), including the possible forms of the onset, nucleus, and coda of each lect, as well as the phonemic and tonemic inventories. In this paper, we present Phonotacticon 1.0, which contains the phonotactic profiles of 516...

Psycholinguistic literature has consistently shown that humans rely on a rich and organized understanding of event knowledge to predict the forthcoming linguistic input during online sentence comprehension. We, the authors, expect sentences to maintain coherence with the preceding context, making congruent sentence sequences easier to process than...

This chapter provides a fresh empirical examination of the interpretations and structures of the focalizing ser (FS) construction in Spanish and the emphatic shi structure in Mandarin Chinese. Its findings support Belletti’s (2004) claim that the TP-internal domain contains a focus projection, similar to what has been argued regarding sentences’ le...

Second-language (L2) acquisition is influenced by the differences and similarities between a learner’s first language (L1) and their target language. Because prior research has shown that Cantonese and Mandarin speakers employ different acoustic strategies to express focus in speech, this study examines how Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) speakers, who a...

Noun compound interpretation, generally framed as the generation of a paraphrase, is important for many natural language processing tasks. In our study, we focus on Chinese noun compound interpretation in the context of natural language inference, by presenting a new dataset designed to study whether language models identify the inferential relatio...

To provide effective support, it is essential for a skilled supporter to emotionally resonate with the help-seeker's current emotional state. In conversational interactions, this emotional alignment is further influenced by the comforting strategies employed by the supporter. Different strategies guide the interlocutors to align their emotions in n...

Aspect, a linguistic category describing how actions and events unfold over time, is traditionally characterized by three semantic properties: stativity, durativity and telicity. In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent these properties are encoded in the verb token embeddings of the contextualized spaces of two English language mod...

The field of Distributional Semantics has recently undergone important changes, with the contextual representations produced by Transformers taking the place of static word embeddings models. Noticeably, previous studies comparing the two types of vectors have only focused on the English language and a limited number of models. In our study, we pre...

Plain Language Summary This study investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of three types of linguistic terms, namely, aspect markers, temporal adverbs, and temporal nouns, to express temporal ideas. The factors that affected their acquisition were also explored. Temporal expressions were extracted from natural language samples obtaine...

The synonym of epistemic “think” in Chinese is understudied. This study surveys the usage of five synonyms of verbs related to “think” – renwei, juede, yiwei, xiang, and kaolü – by using the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. By studying the contexts of the target verbs, we report the distributions of three types of nouns and two ty...

Much research on the function of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese has been conducted. However, there is a controversy about the ba NP regarding whether it expresses a topic denotation, a focus denotation, or neither. To study its information function, the present study has adopted a structural priming paradigm in a self-paced reading experim...

Mandarin alphabetical words (MAWs) refer to the code-mixing of Romanized letters and characters such as X光 ‘X-ray’ in the Mandarin lexicon. Previous studies have mainly focused on MAWs’ formation but lacked empirical evidence regarding their morpho-syntactic behaviours. Classifiers have been used to infer nominals’ semantic properties and character...

As neural language models (NLMs) based on Transformers are becoming increasingly dominant in natural language processing, several studies have proposed analyzing the semantic and pragmatic abilities of such models. In our study, we aimed at investigating the effect of discourse connectives on NLMs with regard to Surprisal scores. We did this by foc...

This study aimed to investigate the impacts of synchronization of face-voice information on the recognition of speakers’ identity, and the perceptual patterns of non-native speakers when matching faces and voices of unfamiliar speakers. Previous research has shown that native English speakers can match faces and voice of unfamiliar speakers at abou...

Non-local dependency in Mandarin wh-questions has been extensively researched in theoretical linguistics, but it remains an under-studied topic in the field of language processing. Unlike languages that require wh-movement to form wh-questions, Mandarin is a wh-in-situ language, and hence is generally assumed to require a covert dependency between...

In this paper, we describe the system that we presented at the TSAR-2022 shared task regarding Lexical Simplification for English, Por-tuguese, and Spanish. We proposed an unsupervised approach in two steps: First, we used a masked language model with word masking for each language to extract possible candidates for the replacement of the difficult...

Inalienable possession differs from alienable possession in that, in the former-e.g., kin-ships and part-whole relations-there is an intrinsic semantic dependency between the possessor and possessum. This paper reports two studies that used acceptability-judgment tasks to investigate whether native Mandarin speakers experienced different levels of...

This paper presents an analysis of interactive alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) from a multimodal perspective (Guichon & Tellier, 2017) in two telecollaborative settings. We propose a framework to analyze alignment during desktop videoconferencing in its multimodality, including lexical and structural alignment (Michel & Cappellini, 2019) as we...

Previous studies of multiple languages have found processing differences between patient-first and agent-first word orders. However, the results are inconsistent as they do not identify a specific ERP component as a unique correlate of thematic role processing. Furthermore, these studies generally confound word order with frequency, as patient-firs...

This chapter explores the morphological poverty of the Chinese from an empirical perspective. Until recently, the nature of affixation in Chinese is still not well recognized and has been one of the hotly debated topics in Chinese morphology. Based on the CKIP Morphological Database (incl. 4025 “affixes” in Chinese), this chapter covers the issue o...

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached...

Sentence-final particles are normally assumed to occur in the CP domain, i.e., the domain of the complementizer phrase. Their exact syntactic position varies given the heterogeneity of these elements. The position of these particles usually depends on how they are categorized semantically, and also on how they conform to different syntactic princip...

This chapter shows that treating the Chinese classifier system as a lexicalized semantic system based on shared ontology predicts both the agreement patterns that motivate the structure-based accounts, and the semantic selection patterns that motivate the cognition-based accounts. In the chapter, different perspectives toward classifiers are introd...

In this chapter, we present a general picture of how topicalization and topicality can be defined in morphosyntactic terms. We start with an overview of the syntax and semantics of topics from the vantage point of generative syntax and formal logic. We then show that the notion of topic prominence can be defined by typological correlations through...

This chapter aims to provide a careful examination of Mandarin Chinese classifiers from a syntactic perspective. A comprehensive overview of the distribution of classifiers is provided along with their syntactic analyses. A central conclusion of this chapter, following much recent work, is that there are two distinct structural configurations that...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

Tone in Chinese languages is distinct in two aspects: (i) the complexity in the tonal make-up and (ii) widespread sandhi. The former is often attributed to underlying complexity in tonal inventories and the latter to triggers immediately adjacent to the sandhi site. Morphosyntax, though highly relevant, is often left unarticulated in the descriptio...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

This chapter synthesizes the alternation patterns in the morphophonology of Chinese affixation, and analyzes rime change (变韵 biànyuùn) mutation-like phenomena in terms of featural affixation. The main goal is to demonstrate that the paucity of affixation in Chinese languages/dialects does not render Chinese alternations less relevant to typological...

Despite the complexity and variation of physical signals, human perception of a speech sound uttered by different talkers or in diverse contexts is amazingly constant. Nonetheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of this fundamental human perceptual ability are not well understood. Even less is known about the neural bases of phonetic constancy. We p...

This chapter revisits the character-based approach to Chinese grammar and the ongoing debate about how to define the concept of a word in Chinese. The authors provide a variety of evidence, including distributional generalizations in corpus and Chinese word-level and phrase-level rules, such as Mandarin alphabetic words, replaceable idioms, and abb...

Current studies of semantic word formation of Chinese compounds aim to work out collocational patterns and semantic patterns. In addition to investigating the surface semantic relations among the composing morphemes of compound words, researchers adopt the methods of semantic-syntactic analyses of sentences and study the predicative relation among...

The primary function of language is to convey what we mean for communication. Semantics, a subfield of linguistics, aims to understand how meanings are encoded and operate in different levels of linguistic forms (such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and discourses). The cumulative evidence thus far has mainly been based on native speaker i...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

Phonological awareness refers to a speaker’s knowledge of the phonological structure of the language. The study of phonological awareness has traditionally been associated with the study of reading. As reading Chinese involves an orthography that does not directly encode phonology, the issue of phonological awareness in Chinese speakers and learner...

The canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO, and yet Modern Chinese does not demonstrate the patterns of a typical VO language. This chapter reviews representative arguments that have contributed to our closer understanding of what pragmatic and semantic factors condition word order variation in Modern Chinese. Discourse analyses in relation...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

Case theory is a theoretical tool in the generative grammar to capture generalizations regarding categorial distribution, particularly the nominal category in relation to others. The notion of case can describe the close relation between grammatical categories, such as a verb/preposition and its object, or the subject of a sentence and the tense or...

Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexic...

The debate on modern Chinese being SVO or SOV is facing a dilemma: the word order is SVO in an unmarked declarative sentence in Chinese, while Chinese exhibits many features shared by SOV languages. To tackle this difficult situation, researchers should focus on language types, but not the relative orders of subject, verb, and object. Based on the...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey...

The primary goal of this chapter is to present the state of the art on Chinese intonation research, with a focus on how tone and intonation interact. To this end, the general functions and forms of intonation observed in (Mandarin) Chinese are first introduced. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the multiplexing of the f0 channel for tone...

The question of what canonical word order Chinese has is not a controversial issue at the present time; most of the studies within the last 30 years assume that the canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO. However, during the 1970s and 80s there was a lively debate on Chinese word order concerning its historical development as well as its sta...

In this chapter, we address the issues related to sentence grammaticality and acceptability. We begin with a discussion of the relationship between the two notions, and point out that despite the differences in theoretical conceptualization, the two notions, grammaticality and acceptability, are often confluent and that grammaticality is usually me...

After critically reviewing the conflicting theories of word-formation, the integral model in Li 2005 is presented which is shown not only to make a minimal number of postulations but also to cover a wide range of cross-linguistic facts: morphological causativization in Bantu and Semitic, compounding in Chinese and English, the resultative construct...

There is a common view that English has word stress but Chinese does not. I examine perceived stress in disyllabic lexical entries and show two similarities between the languages: (i) when both syllables carry a designated tone, such as such as bamboo or Red Cross in English, or 北京 Beijing ‘Beijing’ in Chinese, main stress is unclear to native spea...

While Chinese is widely considered a topic-prominent language and 'topic' may be a useful notion for describing some of the unique grammatical features of Chinese, natural text/speech data call for a re-examination of its nature and the ways in which it is manifested and deployed in discourse. My multiple genre-based investigation shows that at a r...

This chapter reviews the descriptive patterns of tone sandhi in Chinese dialects along with the experimental investigations of what generalizations native speakers make regarding these patterns, how they process them in production and perception, and how children acquire these patterns. Theoretical issues that tone sandhi sheds light on, including...

This chapter reviews and discusses issues involving the case theory in the generative framework of syntax with data from Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Specifically, it addresses the interrelationship of abstract case, morphological case, and the thematic roles of NPs; the association between the distribution of NPs a...

This paper reports results of a semantic priming study on the activation of semantic alternatives by focus phrases in Mandarin introduced by focus-operators – zhiyou ‘only’ and lian ‘even’ – located in two sentence positions (initial and internal). In this study, we used a lexical semantic priming paradigm to study how native mature readers of Mand...

An iconic pattern across spoken languages is that words for ‘this’ and ‘here’ tend to have high front vowels, whereas words for ‘that’ and ‘there’ tend to have low and/or back vowels. In Italian, there are two synonymous Italian words for ‘here’, namely qui and qua, and two synonymous words for ‘there’, lì and là. Qui ‘here’ and là ‘there’ are icon...

The focus of this study is the reading behavior of student interpreters during the process of Chinese-English sight translation. Eye-tracking was adopted to examine whether and how student interpreters' real-time reading is affected by the degree of word order asymmetry and modulated by the amount of contextual information available. A group of int...

抽象的 本文分析重慶方言中七個句末語氣詞各自獨特的核心意義和功能並論證它們的結構位置。我們認為重慶方言的句末語氣詞可以分為三大類，符合 Rizzi (1997) 與 Paul (2014) 的CP分裂假說，它們在結構上分別在不同功能層中佔據中心語位置，其中重慶話的「lao」和普通話句末語氣詞「了」用法相同且佔據相同的位置，標示句子的限定性。「mai」、「ha」、「suo」三個疑問語氣詞標示疑問句，選擇陳述句為補足語構成是非問句，作為定義句子類型的Force中心語；但這三個疑問語氣詞分別表達命題和說話人預設之間不同的關聯。對於語法文獻中較少討論、與語篇相關的三個篇章語氣詞本文中也特別一併分析它們的語義及結構限制。本文主張重慶方言中篇章語氣詞在結構上受句法限制較小，因此可以運用在不同句子類型中，...

This study investigated whether and how different types of temporal metaphors in the lexicon and individual reading habits influence native Chinese speakers’ conceptualizations of time. The results indicate that the Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking participants constructed time expressions differently to some extent. Both groups responded faster on...

This paper investigates the thematic types and derivations of subjects in Mandarin bei-passives. Based on an examination of the categorial status of bei discussed in the literature, we try a new approach by adopting Liu and Huang’s view that the mechanism of deriving bei-passives is argument raising (in which bei is a semi-lexical verb heading the...

This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turn-taking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around 11.4 million words of British English conversations and identify behavioural differences between speakers that a...

This paper explores the impact of word order asymmetry between source language and target language on cognitive load during Chinese-English sight translation. Twenty-five MA students of translation from a Hong Kong university were asked to sight translate sentences with different degrees of between-language structural asymmetry from Chinese into En...

This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turn-taking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around 11.4 million words of British English conversations and identify behavioural differences between speakers that a...

Abstract Preparation to use information and communication technology (ICT) is an important component of preservice language teachers’ training, and various existing teacher training models propose a range of strategies for increasing their technology knowledge and technology adoption rates. However, the relative effectiveness of these strategies re...

We report results of a speech production experiment about the prosody of wh-indeterminates and three types of sentences in Hong Kong Cantonese, and discuss our results in relation to the characteristics of focus prosody and the prosodic-syntactic effects on sentence final particles (SFPs). Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous be...

The integration of technology in language teaching has been one important topic in language education and teacher training. Teacher education has been one of the aims of telecollaboration since the beginning of the 2000’s. While the first pioneers worked with small groups of students (Develotte, Mangenot, & Zourou, 2005; MüllerHartmann, 2006), more...

This study reports the results of two sets of corpus studies on the use of beneficiary structures (wèi-dòng shì), one in modern and the other in ancient Chinese. First, we analyzed the semantic associations of the word wèile ‘do something for something/someone’ in modern Chinese, using two corpora and the word-embedding model. The results were in l...

Although there are similarities between the uses of the word dou in Mandarin and Cantonese, there are also striking differences that have rarely been discussed in the literature. As well as raising awareness of this fact, the present study contributes to our understanding of how dou’s different semantic functions can be structurally distinguished:...

Cross-linguistically, the way that focus is marked through prosody can depend on a variety of factors, including local constraints on prosodic organizat ion or the position of a word within the larger focus constituent. Here we report on a production study that explores the possible influence of prosodic organization and position on focus realizati...

We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types in Taiwan Mandarin, and discuss our results with implications for focus acoustics, and semantic-syntactic theories of sentence final particles and wh-indeterminates. Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous between interrogative and inde...

The acoustic realization of focus can be influenced by the position of a focalized word in a larger constituent and by constraints on prosodic organization of an utterance. Here, we report four production studies that explore the potential effects of local prosodic organization on the realization of focus in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) and Taiwan Man...

This paper explores an understudied phenomenon in Chinese: complex nominal sequences comprising a proper name, a pronoun, a demonstrative, a numeral, a classifier, and a noun; with the purpose of examining their special appos-itive structures, and whether the possessor theta role requires a unique structural position (like other thematic roles). Sp...

We report production data on the prosodic realization of two types of foci (constituent wh-answers, and constituent correction) of two Chinese languages that are very different from Mandarin: Hong Kong Cantonese and Teochew (a variety of Southern Min dialect spoken in Jieyang, Guangdong China). The results indicated that unlike what was reported ab...

Previous studies have shown that laizhe can be compatible with some types of verbs, and that it is related to a certain concept of past tense. However, there is no consensus about the exact conditions that allow laizhe to surface in a sentence. This study argues that simply examining verbal semantics is insufficient to identifying the use and funct...

This chapter is a qualitative exploration and synthesis of research on online world-language courses in K-12 settings, focusing on such courses’ e¢ectiveness and the unique challenges of maintaining the quality of language courses as they move from face-to-face to online environments. It identi£es two key factors contributing to K-12 students’ worl...