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

Abstract

It is well known that sentence boundaries in Mandarin Chinese texts are to some extent flexible and subjective. Sentence boundaries are used parsimoniously in Mandarin Chinese and they often do not occur until the end of a block of clauses and so express the completeness of a meaning or an idea. Nonetheless, our hypothesis is that native Chinese depends on unspoken principles for judging the degree of completeness of meaning within a block of clauses. The concern on perceiving sentence boundaries by Chinese readers is similar as the issue of how Chinese readers segment words boundaries which has been investigated extensively. The former topic has, however, seldom been examined. The concern of our investigation is the kinds of unspoken principles or factors that play a role in detecting sentence boundaries (the practice of periods). Tackling these problems is an essential prerequisite to understanding the nature of this fundamental unit in Chinese, and gaining further insight into how Chinese readers perceive the completeness of meaning in this language. In order to clarify these issues, we conducted the re-punctuation experiments in the two separate groups (the training set vs. the testing set) that use different stimuli. Annotation data was also collected from the stimuli texts annotated by linguistic information at different levels. Logistic regression and the Bayesian statistical methods was then applied so as to test the effects of independent variables on the response variable. It turns out that the syntactic information does affect the response variable. The logistic regression model works well in making good predictions about the data of the testing set. We propose that the sentence boundaries in Chinese are most probably semantically and textually conceptualized rather than syntactically defined.

Constructing the Corpus of Chinese Textual ‘Run-on’ Sentences (CCTRS)

“…This is because we only want to investigate how semantic leaps occur within a block of clauses that native Chinese speakers/ readers perceive as having a complete meaning. As is well-known, multiple clauses can be joined by using commas without conjunctions in Chinese texts, with the period (i.e., " 。 " in Chinese) occurring at the end of the block of clauses and indicating the completeness of the meaning or idea therein rather than the completeness of a sentential structure (Lu & Zhu, 2013:322;Huang, 1997;Xue & Yang, 2011, Sun &Lu, 2021.…”