Approaching The Double‐Nominal Construction In Mandarin Chinese Through The Semantic‐Cognitive Interaction

Abstract

The double‐nominal construction (DNC), also called ‘topic construction’, is a common occurrence in Chinese and other East Asian languages. It is characterized by two initial NPs which appear before the predicate verb. The construction has mostly been analyzed using the syntactic angle singly approach. The topic (the initial nominal phrase, abbreviated as NP1) needs to syntactically establish some connection with the comment (the rest of the construction) but this has, unfortunately, not been the case due to numerous counterexamples. This construction is so complex that other factors have to be taken into account. This paper addresses the major concern about the problem of the two Initial NPs’ transposition in various DNCs, an area that does not appear to have previously been sufficiently explored. Compared with other languages, the transposition of two initial NPs in DNC is unique to Chinese. The transposition with two initial NPs in each type of DNC performs quite differently, so we should make finer classification for DNC reasonably. In order to propose reasonable classification of DNC, we need to clarify the relationship between NP1 and the rest of the construction. Meanwhile, in order to tackle the problem of the two NPs’ transposition in a special type of DNC called dangling topic construction, we propose a more reasonable and precise interpretation of the relationship between topic and comment in this construction using the event‐based model and the event integration. This study shows how, depending on the syntactic‐semantic behavior of NP1, Chinese DNCs can be classified into three types. Finally, based on the three types of DNC proposed, a semantic‐cognitive interaction helps to explain and resolve the problem of NPs’ transposition for each type. This study, therefore, provides a unified and more developed account of Chinese DNC. Consequently, a semantic‐cognitive approach is likely to shed more light on the notion of topic construction and help understand how Chinese native speakers comprehend its structure and construct the meaning.

The Role of Mutual Information and Semantic Similarity in Sentence Processing: The Case of Dangling Topic Construction in Chinese

“…We created a variable called "tcrelNum" to annotate the relation of the topic and the comment in each sentence using one of the three types: "reason", "result" and "itself". The nature of "tcrelNum" is one kind of semantic relation concerning the event knowledge (Sun, 2018). By contrast, "c_str" describes grammatical or syntactic features.…”

“…Instead, our findings suggest that the information concerning the topic and the comment and the Bayesian probability regarding the topic and the comment are predicative of the acceptance degree of topic construction. Moreover, the three types of topic-comment relation (i.e., result, reason, itself, and their event knowledge (Sun, 2018)) play a role in comprehending or processing dangling topic constructions. The information on event knowledge in the topic-comment relation facilitates sentence processing, especially when it is combined with Bayesian inference.…”

“…The differences between dangling topic construction and other types of topic construction can be summarized roughly in the following table. More details can be found in Sun (2018). Traditionally, in one focus of previous studies, the relationship between the topic and comment is interpreted as "aboutness" (Chafe, 1976;Li and Thompson, 1981).…”

The Complexity of Zero Anaphora in Chinese Discourse: An Event-related Perspective

“…Every zero form from C1-C9, however, has the same constituent, "yellow flower wheat fruit", and this same constituent occurs in each clause. (Sun 2015(Sun , 2018(Sun , 2019a(Sun , 2019b Some ZAs in this passage have nominal referents derived from the previous clauses through gradual accumulation, but sometimes their antecedents are not always nominal, for example, the…”

Predicting Native Chinese Readers’ Perception of Sentence Boundaries in Written Texts

“…There are numerous studies addressing the special characteristics of Chinese sentences, such as topic construction, serial verb construction and so on (Shi, 2000;Sun, 2018;Paul, 2008). Linguists working on Chinese often emphasize how the Chinese language differs from Indo-European languages from the morphological and syntactic perspectives (Chappell & Peyraube, 2007;Wu & He, 2015).…”