http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/737 2013-06-14T04:58:18Z 2013-06-14T04:58:18Z Zeng, Ting (曾婷) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6942 2013-06-13T02:36:42Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: A phonetic study of the sounds and tones in Xiangxiang Chinese Authors: Zeng, Ting (曾婷) Abstract: This dissertation is a comprehensive phonetic study of the consonants, vowels and tones in Xiangxiang Chinese, which is one of the representatives of the old Xiang dialects of Chinese. Xiangxiang Chinese is among the poorly understood dialects of Chinese because of the lack of articulatory, aerodynamic and acoustic experiments investigating its sound system. For the consonants, three experiments were conducted. First, a palatographic and linguographic experiment was conducted to determine for each consonant which part of the palate makes contact with the tongue (place of articulation), which part of tongue makes contact with the palate (location of constriction), and the manner of articulation. Second, the acoustic properties associated with the voicing distinction in obstruents were studied. Specifically, several acoustic parameters identified in past studies as acoustic correlates of the voicing distinction in stops, fricatives and affricates were analysed. Third, an aerodynamic experiment was conducted on the prevocalic consonants that correspond to the Middle Chinese initial consonants /*n-/ and /*l-/, with the aim of determining whether this historical distinction in Middle Chinese has been lost or retained in modern Xiangxiang Chinese. To accomplish this, the Middle Chinese distinction between /*n-/ and /*l-/ was first defined by examining the aerodynamic characteristics of [n] and [l] in those Chinese dialects where these two segments are still contrastive as phonemes. The hypothesis was that these dialects may have preserved the phonetic details of this distinction and that these details cannot be recovered in any other way. For the vowels, an acoustic experiment was first conducted to study the formant patterns and temporal organisation of the monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs. Then an aerodynamic experiment was conducted to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of vowel nasalisation. Specifically, the correlations between the degree of vowel nasalisation and factors like vowel height, vowel backness and type of nasal environment were examined. For the tones, an acoustic experiment was conducted on both citation tones and tone sandhi for bi-syllabic and poly-syllabic words. To have a better understanding of the nature of sounds in Xiangxiang Chinese, comparisons were made between the findings of the present study and i) the impressionistic descriptions of the phonetic characteristics of the sounds in Xiangxiang Chinese in past studies and ii) past findings on similar sounds in other (major) Chinese dialects or languages. Moreover, the results in this study that have implications for recent phonetic theories and models were highlighted and discussed in detail. Notes: CityU Call Number: PL1870.X53 Z45 2011; xxxii, 718 leaves : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 407-424)

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Yao, Shuiying (姚水英) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6940 2013-06-13T02:36:37Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: NP interpretation and the word order constraint in Mandarin Chinese Authors: Yao, Shuiying (姚水英) Abstract: This thesis investigates the constraint on the postverbal position in Mandarin Chinese via paying particular attention to the interaction between NP interpretation and the word order constraint in three different types of constructions in Mandarin. The phenonmenon of definiteness tendency has been a hot topic and several approaches within different theoretic frameworks have been proposed to account for this cross‐linguistic tendency, such as the analysis based on information structure (Chafe 1976, Li and Thompson 1980; Lambretch 1996, Belletti 2001, Xu 2004, among others), the syntax‐semantics Map.ping Hypothesis (Diesing 1992, Tsai 1994, 2004), etc. However, no approach has given us a precise prediction concerning the kind of NPs that is allowed in the postverbal positions in Mandarin, including the 'V NP Duration/Frequency NP'construction, the double object construction and the non‐standard construction involving an intransitive verb and an agent‐like postverbal NP.Unlike previous studies, the present thesis characterizes two distinct types of constituents in terms of presupposition instead of definiteness, and defines the presupposition using Zucchi's (1995) term of non‐emptiness, which is originated from Heim (1982). The presuppositional and non‐presuppositional NPs can thus be characterized as follows Unlike previous studies, the present thesis characterizes two distinct types of constituents in terms of presupposition instead of definiteness, and defines the presupposition in the semantic-pragmatic way with Zucchi's (1995) term of non-emptiness, which is originated from Heim (1982).The distinction between presuppositional and non-presuppositional NPs thus can be characterized by the following rule: NPs are presuppositional if and only if the set of discouse referents denoted by the NP is unambiguously non-empty; otherwise, they are non-presuppositional. and the process of NP interpretation in Mandarin can be stated as in the following chart: The chart: NP Interpretation process in Mandarin Dissimilar to Diesing's (1992) VP-boundary hypothesis or Tsai's (2004) IP-boundary mapping analysis, the thesis advocates further that it is the VP-innermost XP position that is the syntactic boundary for the distinction between the presuppositional and nonpresuppositional indefinite NPs, and the postverbal formations or the word order constraints in above three types of constructions in Mandarin as a matter of fact is syntactically-semantically rooted, which uniformly are restricted to the NP interpretation Constraint, as stated below: The indefinite must be located at the VP-innermost XP position for nonpresuppositional interpretation The significance of the present research is two-fold. Firstly, the above assumption discloses the relationship between NP interpretation and the word order constraint in Mandarin. In brief, the ordering of two object NPs in double object constructions is constrained by the NP interpretation condition and thus is quite restricted to be constructed as presuppositional NP2 > (non-) presuppositional NP1; the agent-like NP ends up with being realized at the postverbal position if it is non-presuppositional in constructions with unergative verbs; and similarily the postverbal co-occurrence of the duration/frequency and normal object NP is allowed unless the normal object NP can be understood as presuppositional. Therefore, the above assumption theoretically makes a good prediction of the word order structuring in Mandarin postverbal positions and reveals its syntactical-semantic root. In other words, the NP interpretation constraint that the indefinites should be located at the VP-innermost XP position for a non-presuppositional interpretation results in the liner order of an utterance, say, presuppotional constituents must preceed non-presuppositional ones. Notes: CityU Call Number: PL1232 .Y36 2012; x, 286 leaves 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2012.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 270-286)

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Wong, Tak Ming (黃德銘) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6939 2013-06-13T02:36:35Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Evaluation of machine translation via parameterized quantification of closeness in word choice and position Authors: Wong, Tak Ming (黃德銘) Abstract: To evaluate the translation quality of machine translation (MT) systems, various automatic metrics have been invented aiming at a fast, objective and replicable estimation similar to human evaluation. Most evaluation metrics in use so far have to rely on some text similarity measures to compute the closeness of MT outputs to corresponding reference human translations by virtue of string-based matching. This mainstream methodology has been criticized for poor discriminative power and disregard of important linguistic features. This thesis is intended to develop novel methodologies to address such deficiencies by formulating and testing a lexical-oriented evaluation metric. The metric quantifies word choice and word position, two fundamental aspects of text similarity. Words are recognized as basic operable text units, providing the basis of an extensive range of features to characterize the multiple dimensions of MT output. At the word level, every word between an output candidate and its reference is compared, covering the structural and phonological aspects of word form, the knowledge- and corpus-based similarity of word sense, and word informativeness. At the sentence level, two language-independent distance measures are formulated to account for word position in sentence and the overall word sequence respectively. At the document level, inter-sentence relationship is captured by a measure of lexical cohesion - an important factor to refl ect text coherence. This approach provides a comprehensive coverage of evaluation addressing different aspects of the quality of MT output. The validity and effectiveness of the methodologies of this novel approach are verified by the performance of the proposed metric. In a couple of open evaluations of MT metrology, our metric performs comprehensively better than the standard metrics in the field and turns out to be highly comparable to several state-of-the-art ones for English and other European languages, in terms of its magnitude of correlation to human assessment. The impact of our metric, owing to its strong performance, is also illustrated through practical ranking of MT systems, in comparison with other metrics. Experimental findings reveal a huge variation of system rankings infl uenced by the choices of metric, which shows how important the right choice of metric is for reliable MT evaluation. Notes: CityU Call Number: P309 .W66 2012; x, 183 leaves 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2012.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-180)

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Ni, Shifeng (倪詩鋒) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6938 2013-06-13T02:36:34Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Language and legal transplants : the evolution of constitutionalism in modern China Authors: Ni, Shifeng (倪詩鋒) Abstract: This study aims to investigate the evolution of constitutionalism in China with a view to exploring different facets of the semantic formation of Chinese constitutionalism in the particular socio-political context in which the legal transplant in question took place. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach by using a corpus-based, data-mining methodology whereby a corpus containing 5305 journal papers from major journals and 640 books on Chinese constitutionalism from major existing databases on Chinese law is compiled. The corpus serves as a conceptual framework for understanding the evolutionary process of Chinese constitutionalism in light of three chronological stages, namely, the late Qing Dynasty (1860 - 1911) as the meaning-incubating stage, the Republic of China (1911 - 1949) as the meaning-making stage, and the People's Republic of China (1949 - present) as the meaning-embodying stage. Constitutionalism was introduced in the late Qing Dynasty as an instrument to pursue a prosperous and powerful China. From the very beginning, constitutionalism was intended to benefit a small group of people without disrupting the Qing authority. The Nineteen Significant Creeds of the Constitution was nothing more than a "paper law", a representation of the ruling power in a constitutional form. After the overthrow of the Qing government, the bourgeois class endeavored to construct a constitutional system that was suitable for China, which emphasized on cooperation among the Party, the government and the constitution. The legal literature of the People's Republic of China emphasizes Chinese constitutionalism with Chinese characteristics, which differs from the constitutionalism of the West. Chinese constitutionalism with Chinese characteristics inherits the pragmatic approach adopted by the Qing government in the meaning-incubating stage. Constitutionalism is still perceived as a political instrument to achieve social and economic stability and development. In describing and defining Chinese constitutionalism, language constructs a Chinese understanding of constitutionalism and hence influences its implementation and practice. The instrumental description and presentation of constitutionalism in legal literature in the meaning-incubating stage and the meaning-making stage renders the current perception of Chinese constitutionalism. The perception and implementation of transplanted legal terms are presented and perceived through language of the recipient country, which could change or even distort the original meaning of transplanted legal terms. Thus language could be employed as a powerful political instrument to tailor transplanted legal terms for its own purpose. Language plays its role in legal literature. The significance of legal literature in legal transplantation and legal development should be recognized and emphasized. The findings of my study not only deepen our understanding of Chinese constitutionalism but also enrich the current academic research in legal transplants. Notes: CityU Call Number: KNQ2070 .N5 2012; x, 263 leaves : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2012.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-248)

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z