A Re-examination of Syntactic Complexity by Investigating the Internal Structure Variations of Adverbial Clauses across Speech and Writing
Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works (RGC: 12, 32, 41, 45) › 32_Refereed conference paper (with ISBN/ISSN) › peer-review
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Detail(s)
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics |
Pages | 715-721 |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2018 |
Conference
Title | 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2018 |
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Place | Hong Kong |
City | Hong Kong |
Period | 1 - 3 December 2018 |
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Abstract
This paper re-examines the debatable issueabout adverbial clause (A,CL) whether it indexes a complex discourse of contemporaryEnglish and how it distributes across Speech(S) and Writing (W) with different subtypes ofstructures by investigating the internal structure variations. A Finite-State-Machine modelis adopted for retrieving the internal structures. Empirical results show that A,CL prevails in W than in S with a higher occurrencerate (W: 31.20% vs. S: 14.80%), which confirms its function of indexing a complex discourse; but the standard token-type-ratio ofits internal structures shows an opposite distribution (W: 12.89% vs. S: 16.66%), whichsuggests a higher structural density/variationof the spoken mode; besides, five subtypesof internal structures are identified with various distributions across S and W: S employsa higher proportion of subordinator-overt subordinating A,CL, while W adopts more infinitive A,CL, including to-infinitives, presentand past participles; coordinated embeddingsand subordinator-covert finite A,CL are commonly found in both modes. Despite of theindividual variance of internal subtypes, statistical test indicates a less noticed fact that theoverall structural variation of A,CL between Sand W is not significant (p-value = 0.5245).
Citation Format(s)
A Re-examination of Syntactic Complexity by Investigating the Internal Structure Variations of Adverbial Clauses across Speech and Writing. / Wan, Mingyu; Fang, Alex Chengyu.
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. p. 715-721.Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works (RGC: 12, 32, 41, 45) › 32_Refereed conference paper (with ISBN/ISSN) › peer-review