Expert Systems For Pragmatic Interoperations Of Ziji And Quantified Noun Phrases In HPSG

This dissertation aims at establishing expert systems for pragmatic interpretations of Chinese reflexive ziji and quantified noun phrases (QNPs) in discourse respectively. An expert is a constraint on various levels: morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic, which influences the pragmatic interpretations of certain linguistic phenomena. An ES is a combination of such constraints for the decision-making on pragmatic interpretations.In this research, pragmatic interpretations are first defined for each phenomenon, 2 (i.e. specific and generic) for ziji and 6 (definite, specific, distributive, collective, reciprocal and generic) for QNPs.Then more valid experts are explored via observation about phenomena in question in corresponding databases containing natural language (NL) materials, for example, the distribution of linguistic forms and expert values, features of antecedent, particular lexical items, distance between ziji or QNPs and their antecedents or co-referring expressions, syntactic position, tense, aspect, voice, number of modifier, co-indexation and text style, to name just a few.Next, proved to be effective in actual analyses, experts are to be evaluated and certain vote(s) are attached to them. Votes on each expert are added up to make a tally. In total, 8 experts of ziji and 23 of QNPs are identified. By abstracting required information by each expert, tallies are calculated to predict the optimal pragmatic interpretation in discourse. It turns out that our ESs can successfully predict the pragmatic interpretations of ziji (91%) and QNPs (80%) respectively in discourse.The ESs are embedded into HPSG framework at the end of each study, which is especially suitable mainly for three reasons. First, it incorporates information on different levels in one feature structure, which is consistent with the nature of an ES. Second, the lexicalist characteristic conforms to the fact that lexical items in Chinese include rich information which to a great extent determines syntactic and semantic structures (陆俭明2006). Third, the modularity of HPSG is highly compatible with its computational realization.At the end of this dissertation, we'll propose a life cycle of linguistic expert system and a model of its computational implementation based on the two studies we conducted in this dissertation.