On the Nature of Word Classes in ChineseK.K. LukeNanyang Technological University

Debates on word classes

• Started in the 1950s – Gao Mingkai, Lü Shuxiang and others on the

relative importance of morphological and syntactic criteria

• Latest one in 2009 (Yuyanxue Luncong)– Shen Jiaxuan, Zhan Weidong and others

• A span of more than 50 years

The first debate

• As a result of the first debate, it was generally agreed that the main criterion for identifying part-of-speech should be syntactic function, not morphology.

• Gabelentz (1881): The existence of grammatical categories is proved by the fact that Chinese words differ in their syntactic behaviour.

• But few have dared to take this argument to its logical conclusion.

Reluctance to follow through

• Famous example of chuban 出版 ‘ publish/ publication’

• 出版图书 ‘ publish books’• 图书的出版 ‘ the publication of books’• 出版发布会 ‘ a ceremony to announce the

publication of a book, i.e., a book launch’

• Reluctance to assign chuban to two or more classes ( 词无定类 )

More recent debates

• “Everybody agrees that the purpose of setting up word classes is for the convenience of doing grammatical analysis, but have word classes brought us more convenience or headache?” (Preface to the 2009 special issue of Yuyanxue Luncong)

• Contributions informed by Linguistic Typology and Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Word classes for NLP

• A degree of arbitrariness in assigning POS tags• No two corpora use the same POS tagset– PKU corpus: 38 tags– Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus: 43 tags– Penn Tree Bank: 33 tags

• No guarantee (or hope) that the POS tags used in NLP will correspond in any way to how words are represented and organised in speakers’ minds.

Sources of problem

• Why can’t scholars agree on word classes in Chinese?– Structure of the language– Psychology of the linguist

Structure of the language

• Little inflectional morphology– Word classes have little morphological marking

• ‘Flexibility’ – chi: chifan ‘eat (rice)’; xiaochi ‘snack’– zao: da zao ‘early morning’; Zao! ‘Morning!’; zao

shuo ‘Why didn’t you say that earlier?’– Jun jun, chen chen, fu fu, zi zi (Confucian Analects)– 齐景公问政於孔子。孔子对曰：「君君臣臣父父子子。」公曰：「善

哉！信如君不君，臣不臣，父不父，子不子，虽有粟，吾得而食诸？」

Psychology of the linguist

• Fear: that Chinese might be regarded as an inferior language without grammar if it turns out that words cannot be assigned to fixed word classes. ( 词无定类 )

• W. von Humboldt (1826): “The Chinese language seems rather to disdain than to neglect the denoting of grammatical categories”.

Psychology of the linguist

• Great reluctance to entertain the possibility that syntactic categories can be determined only by reference to constructions.

• Li Jinxi 1950 ( 黎锦熙 ) ：依句辨品、离句无品。(Words do not belong to any syntactic classes until they enter into a construction.)

• Li Jinxi’s view has almost been universally rejected for fear that it may lead to an unwanted conclusion: Words don’t belong to unique word classes in Chinese.

Unnecessary worries

• But:– First, no fixed word classes doesn’t mean no word

classes; and– Second, no word classes doesn’t mean no

grammar.

One word, one class?

• Great effort made to ensure ‘one word, one class’ and rule out the possibility of class overlapping (e.g., Lu Jianming 1994).– When all members of a class can occur in a ‘non-typical’

position (e.g. All verbs can take subject or complement position)• laodong ‘work’: laodong guangrong, xihuan laodong

– Temporary shifts• Tai junfa le! ‘That’s too warlord-like!’

– Different meanings• suo ‘to lock/ a lock’; daibiao; baogao

Noun or Verb?

• Possible cases of overlapping– Yanjiu ‘research’, diaocha ‘survey’, chuban ‘publish’

• Morphology no help– chuban ‘to publish/publication’– yanjiu ‘to research/a piece of research’– Nothing in the form of these words tells us whether

they are nouns or verbs.• Nominalization?– General reluctance to treat chuban in zhe ben shu de

chuban as overlapping or nominalization

Diaocha in PKU corpus

• 调查语言 (v) ‘to survey languages’• 语言调查 (vn) ‘language survey’• 进行调查 (vn) ‘conduct a survey’• 大规模调查 (v/vn) ‘large-scale survey’• 通过调查 (v) ‘through surveying X/ through a

survey of X’

Different views

• Huang Changning 黄昌宁– Class overlapping

• Guo Rui 郭锐– Verbs (‘priority treatment’ – youxian kaolü)• Reasons: economy, ‘psychological acceptance’

• Shen Jiaxuan 沈家煊– Verbs as nouns

Huang Changning

• X-bar theory: Head of an NP should be an N• No good reason why words like chuban and

yanjiu should not be treated as nouns, just like any other word in the same syntactic position:– zhe ben shu de chuban 这本书的出版– [NP X de N]

Guo Rui

• Words like chuban and diaocha are verbs.• Distinction between lexical meaning and

syntactic function• Unlike other languages, in Chinese verbs (and

adjectives) can simply occupy the Head position of a NP without undergoing any licensing process, e.g., nominalization.

• Overlapping is acceptable only if it’s rare.

Shen Jiaxuan

AVN

• Noun as a superclass• Relationship between N

and V: ‘constitution’ as opposed to ‘realization’ (as in derivational morphology)

• E.g., English realise (v) > realisation (n); cf. Chinese shixian (v/n)

A constructionist approach

• I’m more in sympathy with Huang, i.e., N/V overlapping

• However, I would add that words belong to different classes by virtue of their occurrence in different constructions.

• This idea is adopted from William Croft’s Radical Construction Grammar (RCG)

• As Randy LaPolla has pointed out, RCG can be used to good effect in analysing Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages.

Radical Construction Grammar

• Key reference: Croft (2001) RCG• RCG is a “nonreductionist theory which

“begins with the larger units and defines the smaller ones in terms of their relation to the larger units”. (2001: 47)

• “Constructions, not categories and relations, are the basic primitive units of syntactic representation.” (2001: 46)

RCG’s conception of language

“The proper definition of speech community is a population of individual speakers who are communicatively isolated from other speakers. The communicative interaction of speakers defines another population: the population of utterances produced by the speakers in a speech community. A language is a population of utterances – not possible utterances, but actual utterances, just as the species is a population of actual organisms.” (2001: 365)

POS in RCG

• Noun and verb are not universal categories.• Word class labels are a convenient way of

referring to classes of words in a particular language.

• ‘Nouns’ and ‘verbs’ of different languages could (and usually do) have very different properties, e.g.,– Have a look/smell (English)– Hen junfa (Chinese), cf. ?very warlord

Constructions

• Form-meaning pairing

• Form: syntactic elements• Meaning: semantic components• Link between form and meaning: symbolic

• The role of each element determined with reference to the construction

Example

王冕七岁上死了父亲Wangmian 7-years-old at died father‘Wangmian’s father died when he was seven’

• The LOSS construction: X LOST Y• Verbs that can take second position come

from a small collection: 丢、失去、弄没、死• ‘At the age of seven, Wangmian lost his father’

Solution

• Role of chuban determined by place in a particular construction– 出版图书 ‘ publish books’ (VO)– 图书的出版 ‘ publication of books’ (X de Y)– 出版发布会 ‘ book launch’ (NN)

• If ‘the same word’ can occur in different constructions, then it will have different syntactic roles defined by those constructions.

• Original question ‘what’s its word class?’ is a misleading question.

Unnecessary worries

• Scanty inflectional morphology– Syntactic position more important

• ‘Flexibility’– Languages probably all flexible each in its own

ways• No word classes does not make Chinese an

inferior language

Flexibility

• English, for example, has a great deal of overlapping too– Most simple nouns can be used as verbs • Chair, table, butter, name, home, light, house, eye,

plant

– Most simple verbs can be used as nouns (in the ‘Have a X’ construction)• Look, walk, say, think, try

Conclusion

• Old paradigm– Words can be assigned to a small number of word

classes according to their syntactic behaviour, and they are stored in the mental lexicon with word class tags attached to them.

• New paradigm– Words have meaning potential. By virtue of their

meaning potential they can enter into particular positions in particular constructions and play roles defined by those constructions.