The Semantic Interpretations Of WH-Phrases In Mandarin Chinese And Its Application

The recognition of language is the crux of processing natural language by computer, but the ambiguity and complexity of language make the recognition difficult. One of the problems is the distinguishing of the interrogative and non-interrogative usages of the mandarin WH-phrases. This thesis focuses on the semantic interpretation of WH-phrases in Mandarin Chinese with optimality theory. And the four constrains and their hierarchy is fixed in the evaluation. Finally, the conclusion is applied into the machine translation on the WH-phrases in Chinese-English and Chinese-Germany, in order to improve the translation quality. The thesis sections as following:In the first chapter the background and the significance of the study are introduced. Up to now there is no effective mode in recognizing the interrogative and non-interrogative usages of mandarin WH-phrases in the machine translation system. It also reviews the former research of the mandarin WH-phrases, sets the study’s theoretical foundation, including the optimality theory, the locality and prominence in natural language, and lists the three research methods. The second chapter concerns the interrogative usages of mandarin WH-phrases, including the relationship between the syntactic positions of WH-phrase and the sentential meaning, and the interrogative degree ofne(呢), ba(吧) and ma(吗), as follows: ne(呢)<<ba(吧)<<ma(吗) In the third chapter the non-interrogative usages of mandarin WH-phrases including existential interpretation and universal interpretation are analyzed. The WH-phrases with existential interpretation appear in the environment of uncertain truth-value including yes-no question, A-not-A question, conditional compound sentence and non-factual verb sentence, and the negative environment including negative sentence and rhetorical question. The WH-phrases with universal interpretation are usually bound by dou (都), quan (全) or ye (也), and also appear in the bare conditional sentence. In the fourth chapter an optimality analysis on the semantic interpretation of mandarin WH-phrase is carried. After summarizing the rule of ma (吗), the rule of V+Neg.+V, the rule of conditional compound sentence, the rule of overt negation, the rule of adverbial operator, the rule of double WH-phrases, the rule of covert negation, the rule of non-factual words and the rule of accentual distribution of dou (都), four hierarchical constrains in mandarin Chinese are concluded, as follows:The marked operator constrain>>the non-asserted environment constrain/the negative environment constrain>>the inevitable interrogation constrain In the fifth chapter the hierarchical constrains are applied into the machine translation of WH-phrase on Chinese-English and Chinese-Germany. Moreover, the recognizing modes of mandarin WH-phrases, which can be put into practice as a guideline, are obtained. In the last chapter the key points of the thesis are summed up, and the shortcomings and the further study are also listed. Some usages of the special mandarin WH-phrases are not discussed in the study. And the next task is putting the recognizing modes of mandarin WH-phrases into the practice of machine translation with interdisciplinary corporation.