Nominal modification works to describe and restrict noun phrases, making the information delivery more vivid and precise. In English, the communicative functions of different modification patterns of head-nouns have been studied in a lot of corpus-based investigations of the written and the spoken registers, but few corpus-based register studies have been ever conducted in Chinese. This research takes the initiative attempt to conduct a corpus-based study on Chinese modification patterns across registers. A one-million-word corpus including both written and spoken Chinese is first built and all the modification patterns of noun phrases are extracted in Chunker, a self-developed colligation query and analysis tool. Through classification of modification patterns and statistical processing, the study displays the distributions of simple and complex modification patterns and the relationship between the frequency of modification patterns and the information density across registers and discusses the functional implication of such distributions and relationship under the guidance of Biber’s register theory.
{"title":"A corpus-based study on Chinese modification patterns of nouns across registers","authors":"Dan Zhang, Minglu Xu, Yunhua Qu","doi":"10.53482/2021_51_392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53482/2021_51_392","url":null,"abstract":"Nominal modification works to describe and restrict noun phrases, making the information delivery more vivid and precise. In English, the communicative functions of different modification patterns of head-nouns have been studied in a lot of corpus-based investigations of the written and the spoken registers, but few corpus-based register studies have been ever conducted in Chinese. This research takes the initiative attempt to conduct a corpus-based study on Chinese modification patterns across registers. A one-million-word corpus including both written and spoken Chinese is first built and all the modification patterns of noun phrases are extracted in Chunker, a self-developed colligation query and analysis tool. Through classification of modification patterns and statistical processing, the study displays the distributions of simple and complex modification patterns and the relationship between the frequency of modification patterns and the information density across registers and discusses the functional implication of such distributions and relationship under the guidance of Biber’s register theory.","PeriodicalId":51918,"journal":{"name":"Glottometrics","volume":"31 1","pages":"13-38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74101884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article is devoted to the study of the stability and variability of part of speech structures in the collections of lyrical poems by B. Pasternak, the Nobel Prize winner for literature. The analysis is based on the methodology proposed by Gabriel Altmann in his studies. The database includes 7 collections of Pasternak’s lyrics, published by him over the period of more than 40 years. The study was carried out on the material of both individual poems and the framework of entire collections. The results obtained showed that in Pasternak's lyrics, nominality of texts is very high. Within the framework of each separate collection a high stability of the general structure of parts of speech was observed. Dynamic description was found to prevail over static description. It was found that both types of description are guided by the tendency to compensation when the growth of one of them causes a decrease in the other. It was discovered that the distribution of parts of speech within each collection of lyrics is very well fitted by the Zipf-Alekseev function. Using the Euclidean distances between the collections of lyrical poems, published during different periods of the author’s creative work, assumptions were made about possible stages of the author's style evolution.
{"title":"Pasternak lyrics: part of speech structure","authors":"S. Andreev","doi":"10.53482/2021_51_391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53482/2021_51_391","url":null,"abstract":"The article is devoted to the study of the stability and variability of part of speech structures in the collections of lyrical poems by B. Pasternak, the Nobel Prize winner for literature. The analysis is based on the methodology proposed by Gabriel Altmann in his studies. The database includes 7 collections of Pasternak’s lyrics, published by him over the period of more than 40 years. The study was carried out on the material of both individual poems and the framework of entire collections. The results obtained showed that in Pasternak's lyrics, nominality of texts is very high. Within the framework of each separate collection a high stability of the general structure of parts of speech was observed. Dynamic description was found to prevail over static description. It was found that both types of description are guided by the tendency to compensation when the growth of one of them causes a decrease in the other. It was discovered that the distribution of parts of speech within each collection of lyrics is very well fitted by the Zipf-Alekseev function. Using the Euclidean distances between the collections of lyrical poems, published during different periods of the author’s creative work, assumptions were made about possible stages of the author's style evolution.","PeriodicalId":51918,"journal":{"name":"Glottometrics","volume":"73 1","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86404889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Morten H. Christiansen, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic dependencies between constituents, independent of the computational limitations of the human brain. Here, we evaluate this independence assumption by sampling sentences uniformly from the space of possible syntactic structures. We find that the average dependency distance between syntactically related words, a proxy for memory limitations, is less than expected by chance in a collection of state-of-the-art classes of dependency grammars. Our findings indicate that memory limitations have permeated grammatical descriptions, suggesting that it may be impossible to build a parsimonious theory of human linguistic productivity independent of non-linguistic cognitive constraints.
{"title":"Memory limitations are hidden in grammar","authors":"Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Morten H. Christiansen, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho","doi":"10.53482/2022_52_397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53482/2022_52_397","url":null,"abstract":"The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic dependencies between constituents, independent of the computational limitations of the human brain. Here, we evaluate this independence assumption by sampling sentences uniformly from the space of possible syntactic structures. We find that the average dependency distance between syntactically related words, a proxy for memory limitations, is less than expected by chance in a collection of state-of-the-art classes of dependency grammars. Our findings indicate that memory limitations have permeated grammatical descriptions, suggesting that it may be impossible to build a parsimonious theory of human linguistic productivity independent of non-linguistic cognitive constraints.","PeriodicalId":51918,"journal":{"name":"Glottometrics","volume":"22 1","pages":"39-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78579716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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