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This book presents a theoretical study on aspect in Chinese, including both situation and viewpoint aspects. Unlike previous studies, which have largely classified linguistic units into different situation types, this study defines a set of ontological event types that are conceptually universal and on the basis of which different languages employ various linguistic devices to describe such events. To do so, it focuses on a particular component of events, namely the viewpoint aspect. It includes and discusses a wealth of examples to show how such ontological events are realized in Chinese. In addition, the study discusses how Chinese modal verbs and adverbs affect the distribution of viewpoint aspects associated with certain situation types.
In turn, the book demonstrates how the proposed linguistic theory can be used in a computational context. Simply identifying events in terms of the verbs and their arguments is insufficient for real situations such as understanding the factivity and the logical/temporal relations between events. The proposed framework offers the possibility of analyzing events in Chinese text, yielding deep semantic information.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Previous Studies.- Chapter 3. Event Structure and Event Types.- Chapter 4. Semantics of Aspectual Markers and Negators in Chinese.- Chapter 5. Formal Representation of Aspect.- Chapter 6. Annotating a Chinese Corpus for Aspectual Study.- Chapter 7. Automatic Aspectual Classification Chinese Sentences.
About the author
Hongzhi Xu received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Department, University of Pennsylvania. He is now an assistant researcher at the Institute of Corpus Study and Application, Shanghai International Studies University. He has published important papers on ACL, COLING, and various aspects of linguistics and computational linguistics.
