A LEXICON-DRIVEN ANALYSIS OF CIBNESE SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS

Serial verb constructions (SVCs), a series of VPs. juxtaposed without any marker between them, is a specific structure in Chinese, which can not be treated as ordinary VPs. Structural ambiguity is the most serious problem for analyzing SVCs. In this paper, we investigate resolution of structural ambiguities of SVCs as well as the related problem, determinism during the course of parsing. We show that some types of SVCs, such as pivotal constructions, sentential subjects and sentential objects, can be dealt with as ordinary VPs through their lexical representations. In addition, we use a reconstructive phrase structure rule for describing the remaining SVCs, two more separate events and descriptive clauses. This reconstructive rule plays the role of eliminating nondeterminism during the course of parsing. At first, these types of SVCs are temporarily analyzed as an S followed by a VP; then after completion of the right-hand side of this rule, reconstruction rules are consulted to build the actual structure of the SVC sentence. The parsing results of SVC sentences are naturally expressed in conventional head-complement structure in HPSG, without inventing any new structure.