Conference article

Quantitative Comparative Syntax on the Cantonese-Mandarin Parallel Dependency Treebank

Tak-sum Wong
City University of Hong Kong

Kim Gerdes
Sorbonne Nouvelle, LPP (CNRS), Paris, France

Herman Leung
City University of Hong Kong

John Lee
City University of Hong Kong

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Published in: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), September 18-20, 2017, Università di Pisa, Italy

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 139:30, p. 266-275

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Published: 2017-09-13

ISBN: 978-91-7685-467-9

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

This paper describes a new Cantonese-Mandarin parallel dependency treebank. We discuss the extent to which the treebank allows for comparative measures with the goal of quantifying structural differences between the two languages. After presenting syntactic differences between the two languages, we computed various frequency measures on the treebank. We present the results and discuss whether they reflect differences in text genre, differences in annotation scheme design, or actual structural differences. Finally, we compare the structural differences to previous accounts of the observed construction.

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