a typological description of chinese word order.pdfVIP

Paddy Fields: A Topological Description of Chinese Word Order1 Pierre Magistry Kim Gerdes CLCLP, TIGP Academia Sinica LPP CNRS , Signes INRIA Graduate Institute of Linguistics ILPGA National Taiwan University Sorbonne Nouvelle pierre@magistry.fr kim.gerdes@univ-paris3.fr Abstract This paper shows how Mandarin Chinese word order can be described in topological terms. After discussing the difficulties in using syntactic dependency and basic word order phenomena of Chi- nese, we provide the foundations of a formal topological grammar that links a syntactic depend- ency tree to all of the possible corresponding word orders. We present the formal rules that allow the generation of simple sentences, as well as the more complex ba and bei-constructions and se- rial verb constructions. 1 Introduction This paper is an account of the work in progress regarding a topological description of some basic word order phenomena of Mandarin Chinese. The topological model Gerdes Kahane, 2001 is a powerful model for linearization. In the Meaning-Text Theory, it can model the interface between surface syntax and the next level, traditionally called morphological representation, that we refer to as the “topological level”, because we not only construct word order and prosodic breaks of different sizes, but a fully- fledged constituent tree. This tree can then provide the basis for the computation of the prosodic groups and pauses. The topological model is a formalization of the traditional analysis of German Drach 1937 and has been shown to allow for an elegant description of word order phenomena like scrambling in V2 or verb final languages that mix syntactic and communicative constraints. The basic idea is that the sen- tence is constructed from fixed places, also called positions or fields, which have different constraints on the number of their occupants. All word order constraints are described in this manner: