Jingxia Lin | Nanyang Technological University (original) (raw)

Papers by Jingxia Lin

Other than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上 fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng 'put on the tab... more 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 set of PPs permits the incorporation of the preposition into the preceding verb to form a V-P compound (" preposition incorporation "), yielding their previous prepositional object to surface as the object of the compound verb V-P. Previous studies claim that adjunct phrases which quantify an event, such as event delimiters, may behave like arguments (" the delimiter hypothesis "). Yet, our observation of Chinese finds that adjunct locative PPs that are not an event delimiter (e.g. directional 向 xiàng/往 wǎng 'toward' PPs or non-directional 在 zài 'at' PPs) can also allow their prepositional object to appear as the verbal object. This thus calls for a modification of the widely accepted delimiter hypothesis. We argue that the semantic characterization of the postverbal locative PPs permitting PI can be generalized as being associated with the denotation of a scalar result. Specifically, we understand " result " from the perspective of " scale structure " proposed in recent studies and argue that in addition to delimiting an event (that is, introducing a closed scale to the event from the scalar perspective), such PPs can also add directional information (an open scale) to the event that they modify or further specify scalar information for the event denoted by the VP. This work not only provides a unified analysis of most types of preposition incorporation that involve the postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese, but is also the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the scalar properties and functions of Chinese locative PPs. Our findings from the Chinese data will also contribute to the cross-linguistic semantic generalization of internal adjuncts and the domain of extended direct case assignment.

Given the historical and linguistic contexts of Singapore, it is both theoretically and practical... more 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 from other Mandarin varieties, and to serve as a reference for future studies on SM. This paper notes that (a) current studies have often provided general descriptions of the variations, but less on individual variations that may lead to more theoretical discussions; (b) the studies on SM are primarily based on the comparison with Mainland China Mandarin; (c) language contact has been taken as the major contributor of the variation in SM, whereas other factors are often neglected; and (d) corpora with SM data are comparatively less developed and the evaluation of data has remained largely in descriptive statistics.

Although Mandarin Chinese is shared by Chinese communities such as Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong K... more 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 with the increasingly recognized notion of " World Chineses " in recent years, the study of the regional variations has also become more linguistically, socially, and culturally significant. Such a study facilitates more efficient communication among speakers of different varieties, reflects the social and cultural differences of the Chinese speaking communities from a linguistic perspective, and contributes to the theoretical discussion of language variation and change. With specific examples of the linguistic features exhibited in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore Mandarin Chinese, this chapter is an overview of the current studies, methodologies, and motivations of variation.

Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use of locati... more 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 optional use of yu proposed previously. It is found that yu tends to follow verbs with high transitivity, which is opposite to Dong (2006) and Xu (2006). The historical development of Chinese is found to be the second most significant constraint: yu is less frequently used especially after the time of Shuihu Quanzhuan. In addition, yu tends to occur with a following monosyllabic NP. Other factors such as focus, zhi (Z̀)-nominalization and prosody are found statistically insignificant. The results of this paper will serve as a quantitative base for further research on the grammatical function of yu.

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2014

Proceedings of Workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resources for Language Processing, 2014

Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility ... more 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 them. Recently, however, classification and identification of light verbs and light verb construction have become a focus of study in computational linguistics, especially in the context of multi-word expression, information retrieval, disambiguation, and parsing. Past linguistic and computational studies on light verbs had very different foci. Linguistic studies tend to focus on the status of light verbs and its various selectional constraints. While NLP studies have focused on light verbs in the context of either a multi-word expression (MWE) or a construction to be identified, classified, or translated, trying to overcome the apparent poverty of semantic content of light verbs. There has been nearly no work attempting to bridge these two lines of research. This paper takes this challenge by proposing a corpus-bases study which classifies and captures syntactic-semantic difference among all light verbs. In this study, we first incorporate results from past linguistic studies to create annotated light verb corpora with syntactic-semantics features. We next adopt a statistic method for automatic identification of light verbs based on this annotated corpora. Our results show that a language resource based methodology optimally incorporating linguistic information can resolve challenges posed by light verbs in NLP.

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Applying NLP Tools to Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, 2014

When PRC was founded on mainland China and the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the relation betw... more 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 China to return to visit through a third location. Although the thawing eventually lead to frequent exchanges, direct travel links, and close commercial ties between Taiwan and mainland China today, 38 years of total isolation from each other did allow the language use to develop into different varieties, which have become a popular topic for mainly lexical studies (e.g., . Grammatical difference of these two variants, however, was not well studied beyond anecdotal observation, partly because the near identity of their grammatical systems. This paper focuses on light verb variations in Mainland and Taiwan variants and finds that the light verbs of these two variants indeed show distributional tendencies. Light verbs are chosen for two reasons: first, they are semantically bleached hence more susceptible to changes and variations. Second, the classification of light verbs is a challenging topic in NLP. We hope our study will contribute to the study of light verbs in Chinese in general. The data adopted for this study was a comparable corpus extracted from Chinese Gigaword Corpus and manually annotated with contextual features that may contribute to light verb variations. A multivariate analysis was conducted to show that for each light verb there is at least one context where the two variants show differences in tendencies (usually the presence/absence of a tendency rather than contrasting tendencies) and can be differentiated. In addition, we carried out a K-Means clustering analysis for the variations and the results are consistent with the multivariate analysis, i.e. the light verbs in Mainland and Taiwan indeed have variations and the variations can be successfully differentiated.

Adverbial clauses are known from traditional grammar as one of three major classes of subordinate... more 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 with regard to their structure and distribution, meanings, functions in discourse, and structural properties influencing their interpretation.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, 2015

Existing treebanks of Mandarin Chinese such as the Sinica Treebank, the Harbin Institute of Techn... more 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 verb constructions can help determine the head of these constructions (Li, 1991; among others). However, the majority of Chinese serial verb constructions do not have overt aspectual markers. Based on large-scale corpus studies, this work investigates the distribution of aspectual markers in Chinese serial verb constructions in order to explore which verb in the serial verbs is more likely to function as the head, and thus provides a reference for parsing serial verb constructions without overt aspectual markers. We find that contrary to previous studies such as , and that treat the first verb in a serial verb construction as the head, Chinese serial verb constructions more often have the second verb as the head. The results of this work can not only serve as a reference for automatic parsing of Chinese data, but also shed light on theoretical studies of the structure of serial verb constructions in Chinese and other serial verb languages.

Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs... more Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements . 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 Vendler system in order to more comprehensively account for a wider range of verbs. By analyzing verbs/verbal compounds from Mandarin Chinese and following the scalar approach, we propose six aspectual classes that are needed not only to adequately accommodate degree achievements, but also to provide a fuller account of all the verbs. This scalar approach can be applied to the aspectual classification of natural languages in general. * We are very grateful to Beth Levin for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

ABSTRACT Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use ... more ABSTRACT 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 the optional use of yu proposed previously. It is found that yu tends to follow verbs with high transitivity, which is opposite to Dong (2006) and Xu (2006). The historical development of Chinese is found to be the second most significant constraint: yu is less frequently used especially after the time of Shuihu Quanzhuan. In addition, yu tends to occur with a following monosyllabic NP. Other factors such as focus, zhi (之)-nominalization and prosody are found statistically insignificant. The results of this paper will serve as a quantitative base for further research on the grammatical function of yu. 有关制约古代汉语地点介词 “於/于” 应用的种种条件，在学术界（方平权（2000），董秀芳（2006），Xu（2006），许敏云（2008）等）有很多不同的说法，至今尚未有定论。 本文通过对历史语料进行“递归分区” 的分析，对所有现行相关的解释进行了测试，用统计学的手段，去伪存真。本文发现在古代汉语中，“於/于”的使用或省略首先与动词的及物性相关。 高及物动词倾向于使用“於/于”来引出地点名词，而低及物动词则不是如此。该结果刚好与董（2006）和Xu（2006）相悖。汉语历史时期是第二个重要影响因素。随着汉语的历史发展，尤其是在《水浒全传》以及之后的文献中，“於/于”使用频率逐步减少。另外一个比较重要的因素是地点名词的音节数，单音节地点名词倾向于用“於/于”引出。但是，用强调、抽象地点名词、韵律等等说法来解释 “於/于” 的相关用法，统计测试结果表明可能是没有科学依据的。本文提供的数据为进一步研究“於/于”在历史文献中的语法功能，建立了一个具有科学依据的基础。

In this study, we compared the tonal patterns of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese to the prosodi... more 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 and emotional intonation, suggesting that emotional cues may be lexicalized in lexical tones.

This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin ... more 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 constraint not only provides a better coverage of the data of Chinese motion constructions from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface, but also illuminates the distribution of motion verbs in other serial verb languages.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Despite the increasing interest in studying Chinese emotion words, there has been no reliable ref... more 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 emotion category and intensity of Chinese emotion words. Results of this study will serve as an important reference for future research on language and emotion.

Other than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上 fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng 'put on the tab... more 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 set of PPs permits the incorporation of the preposition into the preceding verb to form a V-P compound (" preposition incorporation "), yielding their previous prepositional object to surface as the object of the compound verb V-P. Previous studies claim that adjunct phrases which quantify an event, such as event delimiters, may behave like arguments (" the delimiter hypothesis "). Yet, our observation of Chinese finds that adjunct locative PPs that are not an event delimiter (e.g. directional 向 xiàng/往 wǎng 'toward' PPs or non-directional 在 zài 'at' PPs) can also allow their prepositional object to appear as the verbal object. This thus calls for a modification of the widely accepted delimiter hypothesis. We argue that the semantic characterization of the postverbal locative PPs permitting PI can be generalized as being associated with the denotation of a scalar result. Specifically, we understand " result " from the perspective of " scale structure " proposed in recent studies and argue that in addition to delimiting an event (that is, introducing a closed scale to the event from the scalar perspective), such PPs can also add directional information (an open scale) to the event that they modify or further specify scalar information for the event denoted by the VP. This work not only provides a unified analysis of most types of preposition incorporation that involve the postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese, but is also the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the scalar properties and functions of Chinese locative PPs. Our findings from the Chinese data will also contribute to the cross-linguistic semantic generalization of internal adjuncts and the domain of extended direct case assignment.

Given the historical and linguistic contexts of Singapore, it is both theoretically and practical... more 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 from other Mandarin varieties, and to serve as a reference for future studies on SM. This paper notes that (a) current studies have often provided general descriptions of the variations, but less on individual variations that may lead to more theoretical discussions; (b) the studies on SM are primarily based on the comparison with Mainland China Mandarin; (c) language contact has been taken as the major contributor of the variation in SM, whereas other factors are often neglected; and (d) corpora with SM data are comparatively less developed and the evaluation of data has remained largely in descriptive statistics.

Although Mandarin Chinese is shared by Chinese communities such as Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong K... more 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 with the increasingly recognized notion of " World Chineses " in recent years, the study of the regional variations has also become more linguistically, socially, and culturally significant. Such a study facilitates more efficient communication among speakers of different varieties, reflects the social and cultural differences of the Chinese speaking communities from a linguistic perspective, and contributes to the theoretical discussion of language variation and change. With specific examples of the linguistic features exhibited in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore Mandarin Chinese, this chapter is an overview of the current studies, methodologies, and motivations of variation.

Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use of locati... more 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 optional use of yu proposed previously. It is found that yu tends to follow verbs with high transitivity, which is opposite to Dong (2006) and Xu (2006). The historical development of Chinese is found to be the second most significant constraint: yu is less frequently used especially after the time of Shuihu Quanzhuan. In addition, yu tends to occur with a following monosyllabic NP. Other factors such as focus, zhi (Z̀)-nominalization and prosody are found statistically insignificant. The results of this paper will serve as a quantitative base for further research on the grammatical function of yu.

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2014

Proceedings of Workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resources for Language Processing, 2014

Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility ... more 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 them. Recently, however, classification and identification of light verbs and light verb construction have become a focus of study in computational linguistics, especially in the context of multi-word expression, information retrieval, disambiguation, and parsing. Past linguistic and computational studies on light verbs had very different foci. Linguistic studies tend to focus on the status of light verbs and its various selectional constraints. While NLP studies have focused on light verbs in the context of either a multi-word expression (MWE) or a construction to be identified, classified, or translated, trying to overcome the apparent poverty of semantic content of light verbs. There has been nearly no work attempting to bridge these two lines of research. This paper takes this challenge by proposing a corpus-bases study which classifies and captures syntactic-semantic difference among all light verbs. In this study, we first incorporate results from past linguistic studies to create annotated light verb corpora with syntactic-semantics features. We next adopt a statistic method for automatic identification of light verbs based on this annotated corpora. Our results show that a language resource based methodology optimally incorporating linguistic information can resolve challenges posed by light verbs in NLP.

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Applying NLP Tools to Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, 2014

When PRC was founded on mainland China and the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the relation betw... more 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 China to return to visit through a third location. Although the thawing eventually lead to frequent exchanges, direct travel links, and close commercial ties between Taiwan and mainland China today, 38 years of total isolation from each other did allow the language use to develop into different varieties, which have become a popular topic for mainly lexical studies (e.g., . Grammatical difference of these two variants, however, was not well studied beyond anecdotal observation, partly because the near identity of their grammatical systems. This paper focuses on light verb variations in Mainland and Taiwan variants and finds that the light verbs of these two variants indeed show distributional tendencies. Light verbs are chosen for two reasons: first, they are semantically bleached hence more susceptible to changes and variations. Second, the classification of light verbs is a challenging topic in NLP. We hope our study will contribute to the study of light verbs in Chinese in general. The data adopted for this study was a comparable corpus extracted from Chinese Gigaword Corpus and manually annotated with contextual features that may contribute to light verb variations. A multivariate analysis was conducted to show that for each light verb there is at least one context where the two variants show differences in tendencies (usually the presence/absence of a tendency rather than contrasting tendencies) and can be differentiated. In addition, we carried out a K-Means clustering analysis for the variations and the results are consistent with the multivariate analysis, i.e. the light verbs in Mainland and Taiwan indeed have variations and the variations can be successfully differentiated.

Adverbial clauses are known from traditional grammar as one of three major classes of subordinate... more 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 with regard to their structure and distribution, meanings, functions in discourse, and structural properties influencing their interpretation.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, 2015

Existing treebanks of Mandarin Chinese such as the Sinica Treebank, the Harbin Institute of Techn... more 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 verb constructions can help determine the head of these constructions (Li, 1991; among others). However, the majority of Chinese serial verb constructions do not have overt aspectual markers. Based on large-scale corpus studies, this work investigates the distribution of aspectual markers in Chinese serial verb constructions in order to explore which verb in the serial verbs is more likely to function as the head, and thus provides a reference for parsing serial verb constructions without overt aspectual markers. We find that contrary to previous studies such as , and that treat the first verb in a serial verb construction as the head, Chinese serial verb constructions more often have the second verb as the head. The results of this work can not only serve as a reference for automatic parsing of Chinese data, but also shed light on theoretical studies of the structure of serial verb constructions in Chinese and other serial verb languages.

Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs... more Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements . 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 Vendler system in order to more comprehensively account for a wider range of verbs. By analyzing verbs/verbal compounds from Mandarin Chinese and following the scalar approach, we propose six aspectual classes that are needed not only to adequately accommodate degree achievements, but also to provide a fuller account of all the verbs. This scalar approach can be applied to the aspectual classification of natural languages in general. * We are very grateful to Beth Levin for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

ABSTRACT Different accounts (Fang 2000; Dong 2006; Xu 2006; Xu 2008; et al.) of the optional use ... more ABSTRACT 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 the optional use of yu proposed previously. It is found that yu tends to follow verbs with high transitivity, which is opposite to Dong (2006) and Xu (2006). The historical development of Chinese is found to be the second most significant constraint: yu is less frequently used especially after the time of Shuihu Quanzhuan. In addition, yu tends to occur with a following monosyllabic NP. Other factors such as focus, zhi (之)-nominalization and prosody are found statistically insignificant. The results of this paper will serve as a quantitative base for further research on the grammatical function of yu. 有关制约古代汉语地点介词 “於/于” 应用的种种条件，在学术界（方平权（2000），董秀芳（2006），Xu（2006），许敏云（2008）等）有很多不同的说法，至今尚未有定论。 本文通过对历史语料进行“递归分区” 的分析，对所有现行相关的解释进行了测试，用统计学的手段，去伪存真。本文发现在古代汉语中，“於/于”的使用或省略首先与动词的及物性相关。 高及物动词倾向于使用“於/于”来引出地点名词，而低及物动词则不是如此。该结果刚好与董（2006）和Xu（2006）相悖。汉语历史时期是第二个重要影响因素。随着汉语的历史发展，尤其是在《水浒全传》以及之后的文献中，“於/于”使用频率逐步减少。另外一个比较重要的因素是地点名词的音节数，单音节地点名词倾向于用“於/于”引出。但是，用强调、抽象地点名词、韵律等等说法来解释 “於/于” 的相关用法，统计测试结果表明可能是没有科学依据的。本文提供的数据为进一步研究“於/于”在历史文献中的语法功能，建立了一个具有科学依据的基础。

In this study, we compared the tonal patterns of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese to the prosodi... more 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 and emotional intonation, suggesting that emotional cues may be lexicalized in lexical tones.

This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin ... more 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 constraint not only provides a better coverage of the data of Chinese motion constructions from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface, but also illuminates the distribution of motion verbs in other serial verb languages.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Despite the increasing interest in studying Chinese emotion words, there has been no reliable ref... more 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 emotion category and intensity of Chinese emotion words. Results of this study will serve as an important reference for future research on language and emotion.