An Investigation of the Factors Influencing Chinese Readers’ Perception of Sentence Boundaries in Mandarin
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Kun Sun
Abstract
Sentence boundaries are used parsimoniously inMandarin Chinese and they often do not occur until the end of a block of clauses and so express the completeness of a meaning or an idea. The concern on perceiving sentence boundaries by Chinese readers is similar to the issue of how Chinese readers segment words boundaries which has been investigated extensively. The former topic has, however, seldomly been examined.Nonetheless, our hypothesis is that native Chinese depends on unspoken principles for judging the degree of completeness of meaning within a block of clauses. In order to clarify these issues, we conducted re-punctuation experiments. Annotation data was also collected from the stimuli texts which were annotated with linguistic information at different levels. The logistic regression method was then applied to test the effects of independent variables on the response variable. It turns out that the syntactic information seems not to affect the response variable. We propose that the sentence boundaries in Chinese aremost probably semantically and textually conceptualized rather than syntactically defined.
Abstract
Sentence boundaries are used parsimoniously inMandarin Chinese and they often do not occur until the end of a block of clauses and so express the completeness of a meaning or an idea. The concern on perceiving sentence boundaries by Chinese readers is similar to the issue of how Chinese readers segment words boundaries which has been investigated extensively. The former topic has, however, seldomly been examined.Nonetheless, our hypothesis is that native Chinese depends on unspoken principles for judging the degree of completeness of meaning within a block of clauses. In order to clarify these issues, we conducted re-punctuation experiments. Annotation data was also collected from the stimuli texts which were annotated with linguistic information at different levels. The logistic regression method was then applied to test the effects of independent variables on the response variable. It turns out that the syntactic information seems not to affect the response variable. We propose that the sentence boundaries in Chinese aremost probably semantically and textually conceptualized rather than syntactically defined.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Vorwort V
- Preface VII
- Inhaltsverzeichnis/Contents IX
- Einleitung XIII
- Introduction XXIII
-
System
- Zur Kommasetzung im Deutschen 3
- ‹/›, ‹,› und ‹,› – Variation und Wandel in der Entwicklung der Kommas im 17. und 18. Jh. aus graph(emat)ischer Perspektive 25
- Das Komma in kontrastiver Perspektive Italienisch–Deutsch 57
- Punctuation Principles in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic Printed Works of the Croatian Protestant Printing Press in Urach (1561–1564) 73
-
Norm
- Isolating the Syntactic Factor in Non-Standard Punctuation 91
- Vom genormten Satzbau zur genormten Interpunktion 109
-
Gebrauch/Use
- Textsegmentierung in Handschrift und Frühdruck 137
- Interpunktion in historischen Patientenbriefen 163
- Japanische Interpunktion im Wandel der Zeit 187
- An Investigation of the Factors Influencing Chinese Readers’ Perception of Sentence Boundaries in Mandarin 215
- The Colon in English, German and Swedish: A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study 237
- Comparing Word Marks 263
- The Ellipsis and the Dash in Italian and English: A Contrastive Perspective 289
-
Erwerb/Acquisition
- Interpunktion – (K)ein Thema für Deutsch als Fremdsprache? 317
- Deutsch und Dänisch im Vergleich: Die Verwendung des Ausrufezeichens 343
- Zur Kommasetzung italienischer DaF-Lernender 369
- Sachregister/Index 397
- Interpunktionszeichenregister/Index of Punctuation Marks 407
- Adressen/Addresses 413
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Vorwort V
- Preface VII
- Inhaltsverzeichnis/Contents IX
- Einleitung XIII
- Introduction XXIII
-
System
- Zur Kommasetzung im Deutschen 3
- ‹/›, ‹,› und ‹,› – Variation und Wandel in der Entwicklung der Kommas im 17. und 18. Jh. aus graph(emat)ischer Perspektive 25
- Das Komma in kontrastiver Perspektive Italienisch–Deutsch 57
- Punctuation Principles in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic Printed Works of the Croatian Protestant Printing Press in Urach (1561–1564) 73
-
Norm
- Isolating the Syntactic Factor in Non-Standard Punctuation 91
- Vom genormten Satzbau zur genormten Interpunktion 109
-
Gebrauch/Use
- Textsegmentierung in Handschrift und Frühdruck 137
- Interpunktion in historischen Patientenbriefen 163
- Japanische Interpunktion im Wandel der Zeit 187
- An Investigation of the Factors Influencing Chinese Readers’ Perception of Sentence Boundaries in Mandarin 215
- The Colon in English, German and Swedish: A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study 237
- Comparing Word Marks 263
- The Ellipsis and the Dash in Italian and English: A Contrastive Perspective 289
-
Erwerb/Acquisition
- Interpunktion – (K)ein Thema für Deutsch als Fremdsprache? 317
- Deutsch und Dänisch im Vergleich: Die Verwendung des Ausrufezeichens 343
- Zur Kommasetzung italienischer DaF-Lernender 369
- Sachregister/Index 397
- Interpunktionszeichenregister/Index of Punctuation Marks 407
- Adressen/Addresses 413
