Word order variation and ba sentences in Chinese

Word Identification For Mandarin Chinese Sentences

Chinese sentences are composed with string of characters without blanks to mark words. However the basic unit for sentence parsing and understanding is word. Therefore the first step of processing Chinese sentences is to identify the words. The difficulties of identifying words include (l) the identification of complex words, such as Determinative-Measure, redupli-cations, derived words etc., (...

Word Order Variation in Khoekhoe

This paper examines word order variation in Khoekhoe (short for Khoekhoegowab, also known as Nama/Damara), a Central Khoisan language spoken in Namibia and South Africa. Khoekhoe has been claimed repeatedly to have a clause-second position (Washburn 2001, den Besten 2002, Brugman 2009) and to have topological fields similar to German (Witzlack-Makarevich 2006). However, previous generative anal...

Postpositions and Word Order Variation in Korean

Focus and Archaic Chinese Word Order

This paper challenges a widely held assumption that the existence of constructions in Archaic Chinese in which an object appeared in preverbal position provides evidence that Pre-Archaic Chinese had OV basic word order. I argue that the preverbal objects in questions – wh-phrases and focused NPs – could not have been base-generated in their surface positions but rather must be analyzed as havin...

Word Order Variation and Tree-Adjoining Grammar

In many headnal languages such as German, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean, but also in some other languages such as Russian, arguments of a verb can occur in any order. Furthermore, arguments can occur outside of their clause (\long-distance scrambling"). Long-distance scrambling presents a challenge both to linguistic theory and to formal frameworks for linguistic description because it is very un...