Predicting syntactic choice in Mandarin Chinese: a corpus-based analysis ofbasentences and SVO sentences

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba sentences and SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba/SVO sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages.

A Comparative Study of Tea Culture in Chinese English Translation: Pedagogical Translation in Second Language Acquisition

“…Chinese tea culture is almost four hundred years old and the entire process of tea making from the time of brewing to the tea ceremony in China is strikingly different from other Western tea producers. While translating the Chinese tea terms into English, several pedagogical issues arise such as the unavailability of translation norms in tea terminology [2], the mistranslation of tea terms, the translator's incapability and unawareness of differences in culture, grammatical differences [3], use of transliteration instead of translation and multi-translation of one tea term.…”