The morpho-syntactic interface in a Chinese phrase structure grammar

This dissertation examines issues related to the morpho-syntactic interface in Chinese, specifically those issues related to the following long standing problems in Chinese Natural Language Processing (NLP): (i) disambiguation in Chinese word identification; (ii) Chinese productive word formation; (iii) borderline phenomena between morphology and syntax, such as Chinese separable verbs and ‘quasi-affixation’.; All these problems pose challenges to an independent Chinese morphology system or separate word segmenter. It is argued that there is a need to bring in syntactic analysis in handling these problems.; To enable syntactic analysis in addition to morphological analysis in an integrated system, it is necessary to develop a Chinese grammar that is capable of representing sufficient information from both morphology and syntax. The dissertation presents the design of such a Chinese phrase structure grammar, named CPSG95 (for Chinese Phrase Structure Grammar). The unique feature of CPSG95 is its incorporation of Chinese morphology in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The interface between morphology and syntax is then defined system-internally in CPSG95 and uniformly represented using the underlying grammar formalism used by the Attribute Logic Engine. For each problem, arguments are presented for the proposed analysis to capture the linguistic generality; morphological or syntactic solutions are formulated based on the analysis. This provides a secured approach to solving problems at the interface of Chinese morphology and syntax.