Dealing with Nominalizations in Mandarin Chinese Using a Principles and Parameters Parser
Koong Lin, Von‐Wun Soo, Sandiway Fong · 1998
This paper proposes how to extend Pappi, a principles and parameters parser which can currently parse ten languages based on the same core grammar, to handle nominalization constructions in Mandarin Chinese by deliberately revising the periphery file without affecting the other languages. There are four categories of nominalizations: relative clauses with a head noun as an adjunct, relative clauses with a head noun as a complement, nominalization with an abstract head noun, and nominalization with empty NP's and acts itself as an NP. We show analysis of such constructions from linguistic point of view based on the principles and parameters approach and its implementation. The experiments used a test corpus made up of sentences taken from judicial documents. A simple pattern matching mechanism was designed to extract sentences containing nominalizations. Experimental results show our work promising.