Hpsg-based Deep Linguistic Processing Of Chinese Object Control Construction

The basic form of object control construction(OCC)is “NP1+VP1+NP2+VP2”,in which VP1 is the object control verb(OCV).NP2 is the object of VP1.It is co-indexed with the subject of VP2.In Chinese,many scholars call it “jian1yu3construction”.In this research,we hold that the sense of VP1 determines whether the construction is an OCC or a “verb + proposition” construction.We focus on OCC in modern Chinese and establish a syntactic-semantic database.Syntactic and semantic descriptions on Chinese OCCs are provided for natural language processing by adopting Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar(HPSG)as the theoretical framework.We describe their syntactic and semantic features in detail and finish the computational realization.864 OCVs in Modern Chinese Dictionary(Dictionary Editing Room,2016)and A Dictionary of Modern Chinese Verb Usage(Meng,Zheng,Meng,& Cai,1999)are exhaustively listed.Then we establish a sense-based OCC database with 16 constituency tests(e.g.,movement tests,pause tests,adding a temporal or locative adverbial,question test on NP2,the assertive sentence test)on OCVs,selecting specific sentences from BCC Corpus and CCL Corpus.It aims to examine whether VP1 and NP2 have a verb-object relationship and further analyze whether those verbs have only one reading as an OCC.Compared with the complements of English OCCs,Chinese OCCs have no apparent non-finite marks and PRO by tests of “zhe”,“le” and “guo” which indicate the tense and aspect.As the results of different tests are analyzed comprehensively,they are shown as S1,S2,S3,S4,S5,S6,S7,and S8.The smaller the number is,the more likely verbs have two readings of both OCCs and “verb + proposition”constructions.According to the integrated passing distribution and the semantic features of verbs,136 verbs have both readings,including senses of “praise” and“hate”.Besides,OCVs are reclassified into 80 types in line with their senses.Each type is sub-grouped into S1 to S8 with the continuum.Based on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage(NSM)semantic primes by Goddard and Wierzbicka(2002,2014 a,2014b),we describe the semantic nuances of OCVs.Finally,the computational implementation of OCCs in Chinese is attained with the database and the linguistic analysis above.In Zhong(Fan,2018;Fan et al.,2015),an HPSG-based computational grammar,we expand the test suite with the simplified OCCs and the lexicon with the formalized syntactic and semantic description of OCVs.864 OCCs in the database are successfully parsed in the computational implementation platform ACE.