How Subjective Is the Subject? A Fresh Look at Grammatical Relations in Mandarin Chinese

Word Order in Mandarin Chinese and Grammatical Relations

It has been argued by LaPolla (1993, 1995) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) -among others -that word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) is (almost) exclusively determined by informational/communicative considerations. Though it cannot be denied that word order does encode informative/communicative considerations such as identifiability, foregrounding, and focalization, it is argued here ...

How structure-sensitive is the parser? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Discriminative Reordering with Chinese Grammatical Relations Features

The prevalence in Chinese of grammatical structures that translate into English in different word orders is an important cause of translation difficulty. While previous work has used phrase-structure parses to deal with such ordering problems, we introduce a richer set of Chinese grammatical relations that describes more semantically abstract relations between words. Using these Chinese grammat...

Magellanic Cloud Planetary Nebulae: A Fresh Look at the Relations between Nebular and Stellar Evolution

Studies of the relationship between planetary nebula morphology and the evolution of the central stars has long suffered from uncertainties in distance determinations, and from the bias of interstellar absorption, that are typical for Galactic PNe. We will be able to eliminate the distance errors and be assured of the sample homogeneity by studying Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) PNe with images f...

How Jingran and Guoran Influence Temporal Relations in Mandarin Chinese: A Case of Semantics-pragmatics Interface

In this paper, I examine how jingran and guoran influence temporal relations in Mandarin Chinese. I argue that, parallel to aspect markers and situation types in Mandarin Chinese (Wu 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2009b, 2010), jingran and guoran specify a default rhetorical relation, which in turns decides a temporal relation, and that they impose a temporal constraint. Because guoran denotes that the pr...