# Expletiveta in Mandarin Chinese: A Quantitative Study

Authors: Yue Yu; Qiurong Zhao
Journal: Complexity
 (2022)

---

## Abstract

Expletive pronouns have posed significant challenges to both linguistic studies and natural language processing in Chinese. Based on the data from the Chinese corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University (CCL), this paper investigates the automatic dependency parsing errors of expletiveta (“it/he”) and relative constructions and provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the characteristics of the constructions in question. The findings not only provide evidence to show that even in radical pro-drop languages such as Mandarin, pleonastics can occur in both object and subject positions but also offer important insights for Chinese natural language processing.


---

## Body

## 1. Introduction

Expletive pronouns, which have no antecedent or referent, are also called “dummy,” “empty,” or “nonreferential” pronouns in the literature and have received considerable attention from lingustic studies in recent decades (see [1–4]; Rothstein [5–8]; Wu and Matthews [9]). Taking the third person singular pronoun ta (‘he/it/she’) in Mandarin as an example (in spoken Chinese, the third person pronoun ta does not make a distinction between feminine and masculine; while in written Chinese, it can be orthographically differentiated into three forms, namely, 它 (‘it’), 他 (‘he’), and 她 (‘she’)), it is canonically construed as referential in the sense that it is anaphorically or cataphorically related to a singular nominal element in the preceding or the following utterances. When used expletively, it has neither an antecedent nor a referent, as shown in (1) and (2).(1)
a.Wo yao haohao shui ta san-tian.I want good good sleep it three day (English word-by-word translation)‘I want to have a sleep for three days’ (English sense translation)b.He ta gegou.drink it classifier (CL)enough‘Drink to one’s satisfaction.’(2)
Ni zhan qilai,pao qilai,guan ta you xie mei xie.you stand up run up no matter it have shoe not have shoe‘Just stand up and run, no matter whether you wear shoes or not.’In the above examples,ta does not refer to any entity in the real world; in other words, expletive ta is realized phonetically, while it is semantically empty. This form-meaning mismatch has inevitably posed significant challenges to lingustic studies and natural language processing.While a great deal of research has been conducted on expletiveta from a qualitative perspective, which has raised controversial questions about its syntactic and semantic properties, it has been studied far less from a data-driven approach. One of the central shifts in linguistic research is that it calls for a quantitative study methodology as Liu [10] points out. He remarks that data-driven research is consistent with modern artificial intelligence based on deep learning. Zhang et al. [11] stress that understanding languages’ nature and organizational rules provides essential insights for natural language processing. Therefore, this paper provides a thorough and fine-grained quantitative survey of Chinese expletive ta and relative constructions based on authentic data extracted from the Chinese corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University (CCL). The contributions of this study are twofold: first, it is hoped to provide a detailed and objective analysis of the characteristics of expletive ta constructions; second, some insights into dependency parsing for the constructions at issue will be offered.This paper is organized as follows. Section2 presents a critical review of previous studies on Chinese expletive ta and relative constructions. Section 3 introduces the data and methods adopted in the current study. Section 4 presents the research results. Section 5 discusses our findings. Finally, Section 6 offers a conclusion.


## 2. Previous Studies on Mandarin Expletiveta

We review two areas of research relevant to the design and implementation of this study: research on the syntactic properties and semantic constraints of expletiveta from the perspective of traditional linguistics and research on pronoun resolution from the perspective of computational linguistics.


### 2.1. Research from the Perspective of Traditional Linguistics

The existing research on expletiveta is mainly concerned with constructions such as shui ta san-tian (‘to sleep for three days’), as illustrated in example (1), where a considerable amount of ink has been spilled on the syntactic properties of ta. Some researchers argue that the construction in question is a double-object construction or pseudo-dual-object construction, and ta serves as the object or pseudo-object ([1–3, 12] among many others), while Yuan [13] states that the construction is a single-object construction, and ta is combined with the preceding verb, and together, they form a disyllable word. Similarly, Ōta [14], and Lin and Zhang [8] argue that ta is encliticised in the verb root, which has grammatically evolved into a clitic. In contrast, Lei and Hu [15] argue that ta is closer to the word that follows it. For example, they believe that ta (‘he’) and ge (CL) have developed into a compound word in he ta ge gou (‘drink to one’s satisfaction’).The semantic constraints of the verb beforeta have also attracted much attention. Some researchers observe that the verbs in constructions such as shui ta san-tian (‘to sleep for three days’) are volitional verbs and cannot adopt perfective aspect markers [3, 16]. Other researchers argue that the constructions in question can adopt perfective aspect markers based on their intuition (e.g., Wang and Wang [17]).As we can see, much research has been done on expletiveta constructions similar to the constructions in example (1), but the above issues are still unclear, mainly because the studies discussed so far have mostly been qualitative and based on the researchers’ personal linguistic knowledge and linguistic intuition. Moreover, little is known about constructions such as guan ta youxie meixie (‘no matter whether one wears shoes or not’) as illustrated in example (2), where guan is understood as a conjunction meaning ‘no matter what’ or ‘regardless of’ and ta occupies the subject position of the conditional clause (Lü [18]), which have different characteristics from constructions such as example (1).


### 2.2.ta in the Perspective of Computational Linguistics

Pronoun processing has long been a key issue in natural language processing, focusing on anaphora resolution, that is, identifying the entities with which pronouns can match (see, e.g., [19]). Taking Chinese pronoun resolution as an example, many researchers have investigated various methods to increase the reference resolution effect, including a deep learning method ([20]; Chen et al. [21]), a tree kernel method [22], and a combinatorial method of semantics and rules [19].Although the previous research has contributed significantly to the information processing and mining of Chinese texts, the existing methods focus on the processing of referential pronouns and aim to filter out the correct referents. A natural consequence is that nonreferential (expletive) pronouns have been relatively neglected. Nonreferential pronouns, we assume, are treated similarly to referential pronouns, and noun phrases or other types of elements are incorrectly assigned to them as referents.In this study, we take automatic dependency parsing as an example to explore the challenges that nonreferential pronounta poses to Chinese information processing, hoping that a more complete and fine-grained quantitative exploration of expletive ta and relative constructions in a latter section may shed some light on those questions.


## 2.1. Research from the Perspective of Traditional Linguistics

The existing research on expletiveta is mainly concerned with constructions such as shui ta san-tian (‘to sleep for three days’), as illustrated in example (1), where a considerable amount of ink has been spilled on the syntactic properties of ta. Some researchers argue that the construction in question is a double-object construction or pseudo-dual-object construction, and ta serves as the object or pseudo-object ([1–3, 12] among many others), while Yuan [13] states that the construction is a single-object construction, and ta is combined with the preceding verb, and together, they form a disyllable word. Similarly, Ōta [14], and Lin and Zhang [8] argue that ta is encliticised in the verb root, which has grammatically evolved into a clitic. In contrast, Lei and Hu [15] argue that ta is closer to the word that follows it. For example, they believe that ta (‘he’) and ge (CL) have developed into a compound word in he ta ge gou (‘drink to one’s satisfaction’).The semantic constraints of the verb beforeta have also attracted much attention. Some researchers observe that the verbs in constructions such as shui ta san-tian (‘to sleep for three days’) are volitional verbs and cannot adopt perfective aspect markers [3, 16]. Other researchers argue that the constructions in question can adopt perfective aspect markers based on their intuition (e.g., Wang and Wang [17]).As we can see, much research has been done on expletiveta constructions similar to the constructions in example (1), but the above issues are still unclear, mainly because the studies discussed so far have mostly been qualitative and based on the researchers’ personal linguistic knowledge and linguistic intuition. Moreover, little is known about constructions such as guan ta youxie meixie (‘no matter whether one wears shoes or not’) as illustrated in example (2), where guan is understood as a conjunction meaning ‘no matter what’ or ‘regardless of’ and ta occupies the subject position of the conditional clause (Lü [18]), which have different characteristics from constructions such as example (1).


## 2.2.ta in the Perspective of Computational Linguistics

Pronoun processing has long been a key issue in natural language processing, focusing on anaphora resolution, that is, identifying the entities with which pronouns can match (see, e.g., [19]). Taking Chinese pronoun resolution as an example, many researchers have investigated various methods to increase the reference resolution effect, including a deep learning method ([20]; Chen et al. [21]), a tree kernel method [22], and a combinatorial method of semantics and rules [19].Although the previous research has contributed significantly to the information processing and mining of Chinese texts, the existing methods focus on the processing of referential pronouns and aim to filter out the correct referents. A natural consequence is that nonreferential (expletive) pronouns have been relatively neglected. Nonreferential pronouns, we assume, are treated similarly to referential pronouns, and noun phrases or other types of elements are incorrectly assigned to them as referents.In this study, we take automatic dependency parsing as an example to explore the challenges that nonreferential pronounta poses to Chinese information processing, hoping that a more complete and fine-grained quantitative exploration of expletive ta and relative constructions in a latter section may shed some light on those questions.


## 3. Data and Methods

### 3.1. Data Sources

The authentic language data of expletiveta are taken from the Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus of Peking University (CCL). CCL (http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpu) is a comprehensive corpus designed to represent both Classical Chinese and Modern Mandarin, which contains about 700 million Chinese characters with samples of both spoken and written Chinese. It consists of various types of texts such as newspapers, magazines, literature, practical texts, television scripts, movie scripts, natural dialogues, TV interviews, and translated texts. Many types of language genres together represent a good diversity of usages in Modern Mandarin. Consequently, the study of expletive ta based on the CCL corpus is assumed to be convincing.


### 3.2. Data Collection

We collected 2,758,189 instances of他(‘he’), 423,213 of 它 (‘it’), and 779,885 of 她 (‘she’) using open-source statistical software PowerGREP (Joyce [23]) since the pronoun ta has three orthographical forms. In order to obtain only potential expletive ta tokens, examples with an obvious referential interpretation were excluded from the results.For example, cases whereta was used to compose words such as the plural pronoun tamen (‘they’) and possessive pronoun tade (‘his/her/its’) were excluded. Subsequently, the remaining data were manually examined and rechecked, ultimately extracting 1,346 instances in which ta had a nonreferential reading. As shown in Table 1, there are 617 instances of expletive ta (‘he’) and 729 of ta (‘it’), while no expletive ta (‘she’) is found.Table 1
Expletiveta in the CCL corpus.
ExpletiveInstancesExpletiveta (‘he’)617 (45.8%)Expletiveta (‘it’)729 (54.2%)Total1346


### 3.3. Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing of expletiveta and relative constructions is grounded in dependency grammar [24–28]. Dependency parsing is currently the mainstream method for Chinese syntactic analysis, especially in the field of natural language processing, due to the simplicity of its form, adherence to human language intuition, ease of application, and ability to deal with word-order flexibility (Liu and Zhang [29]). According to dependency grammar, the syntactic structure of a sentence consists of nothing but the dependencies between individual words. A syntactic dependency relation has a number of properties:(a)
It is a binary relation between two linguistic units.(b)
It is usually asymmetrical and directed, with one of the two units acting as the head and the other as the dependent.(c)
It is labeled, and the type of the dependency relation is usually indicated as using a label on top of the arc linking the two units ([30]: 1568).Figure1 provides an example. The directed arcs in the graph from the head to dependent show the asymmetric relationship between two units. The label on the arc stands for the dependency type or syntactic function and shows the dependency relation between the head and dependent. For example, the label on the arc from “has” to “apple” is “obj,” which means “apple” serves as the object of the verb “has.” Dependency analysis can thus be viewed as the set of all dependencies in a sentence.Figure 1
Syntactic dependency structure ofThe boy has an apple.This study is mainly concerned with the dependencies related to expletiveta, including the head and dependent asymmetric relationship and the corresponding dependencies, which are automatically processed by Stanford Parser (Chen and Manning [31]).


### 3.4. Automatic Parsing

Word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging were first implemented using software ICTCLA (developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences) before manual correction. Subsequently, the tagged data were processed by the Stanford Parser, an automatic parsing tool, to conduct dependency parsing. According to an empirical study by Liu and Zhang [29], the accuracy of the Stanford Parser for automatic syntactic parsing of Chinese is the highest among current parsers. They report that the precision rates of dependencies for literary and nonliterary Chinese texts done by Stanford Parser are as high as 82.16% and 85.82%, respectively.


### 3.5. Quantitative Analysis

After the automatic parsing, we manually checked the results, focusing on the dependencies related to expletiveta. Then, we took a closer look at the extracted original data further to explore the features of the constructions in question and provided a complete and fine-grained quantitative analysis of the constructions, hoping to shed some light on the syntactic parsing of expletive ta constructions.


## 3.1. Data Sources

The authentic language data of expletiveta are taken from the Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus of Peking University (CCL). CCL (http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpu) is a comprehensive corpus designed to represent both Classical Chinese and Modern Mandarin, which contains about 700 million Chinese characters with samples of both spoken and written Chinese. It consists of various types of texts such as newspapers, magazines, literature, practical texts, television scripts, movie scripts, natural dialogues, TV interviews, and translated texts. Many types of language genres together represent a good diversity of usages in Modern Mandarin. Consequently, the study of expletive ta based on the CCL corpus is assumed to be convincing.


## 3.2. Data Collection

We collected 2,758,189 instances of他(‘he’), 423,213 of 它 (‘it’), and 779,885 of 她 (‘she’) using open-source statistical software PowerGREP (Joyce [23]) since the pronoun ta has three orthographical forms. In order to obtain only potential expletive ta tokens, examples with an obvious referential interpretation were excluded from the results.For example, cases whereta was used to compose words such as the plural pronoun tamen (‘they’) and possessive pronoun tade (‘his/her/its’) were excluded. Subsequently, the remaining data were manually examined and rechecked, ultimately extracting 1,346 instances in which ta had a nonreferential reading. As shown in Table 1, there are 617 instances of expletive ta (‘he’) and 729 of ta (‘it’), while no expletive ta (‘she’) is found.Table 1
Expletiveta in the CCL corpus.
ExpletiveInstancesExpletiveta (‘he’)617 (45.8%)Expletiveta (‘it’)729 (54.2%)Total1346


## 3.3. Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing of expletiveta and relative constructions is grounded in dependency grammar [24–28]. Dependency parsing is currently the mainstream method for Chinese syntactic analysis, especially in the field of natural language processing, due to the simplicity of its form, adherence to human language intuition, ease of application, and ability to deal with word-order flexibility (Liu and Zhang [29]). According to dependency grammar, the syntactic structure of a sentence consists of nothing but the dependencies between individual words. A syntactic dependency relation has a number of properties:(a)
It is a binary relation between two linguistic units.(b)
It is usually asymmetrical and directed, with one of the two units acting as the head and the other as the dependent.(c)
It is labeled, and the type of the dependency relation is usually indicated as using a label on top of the arc linking the two units ([30]: 1568).Figure1 provides an example. The directed arcs in the graph from the head to dependent show the asymmetric relationship between two units. The label on the arc stands for the dependency type or syntactic function and shows the dependency relation between the head and dependent. For example, the label on the arc from “has” to “apple” is “obj,” which means “apple” serves as the object of the verb “has.” Dependency analysis can thus be viewed as the set of all dependencies in a sentence.Figure 1
Syntactic dependency structure ofThe boy has an apple.This study is mainly concerned with the dependencies related to expletiveta, including the head and dependent asymmetric relationship and the corresponding dependencies, which are automatically processed by Stanford Parser (Chen and Manning [31]).


## 3.4. Automatic Parsing

Word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging were first implemented using software ICTCLA (developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences) before manual correction. Subsequently, the tagged data were processed by the Stanford Parser, an automatic parsing tool, to conduct dependency parsing. According to an empirical study by Liu and Zhang [29], the accuracy of the Stanford Parser for automatic syntactic parsing of Chinese is the highest among current parsers. They report that the precision rates of dependencies for literary and nonliterary Chinese texts done by Stanford Parser are as high as 82.16% and 85.82%, respectively.


## 3.5. Quantitative Analysis

After the automatic parsing, we manually checked the results, focusing on the dependencies related to expletiveta. Then, we took a closer look at the extracted original data further to explore the features of the constructions in question and provided a complete and fine-grained quantitative analysis of the constructions, hoping to shed some light on the syntactic parsing of expletive ta constructions.


## 4. Findings and Results

### 4.1. Automatic Parsing Results

#### 4.1.1. Low Automatic Parsing Accuracy

We first examined the accuracy rate of dependencies with respect to expletiveta, including head-dependent relation and dependencies. The results show that the dependency accuracy of parsing special constructions is much lower than the mean accuracy of 82.16% for literary or 85.82% for nonliterary texts (Liu and Zhang [29]). In the current study of expletive ta constructions, only 29.3% of the head-dependent relations were correctly identified, and the dependencies were all incorrectly annotated, as illustrated in Table 2.Table 2
Accuracy of dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Head-dependent relation (%)Dependency (%)Expletiveta-related nodes29.30


#### 4.1.2. Various Spurious Dependencies

Next, we scrutinized the dependencies related to expletiveta and found that several dependencies had been falsely recognized, as shown in Table 3.Table 3
False dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Dependency ofta-related nodesRatio (%)dobj (direct object)35.8nn (noun compound modifier)30.7nsubj (nominal subject)22.5dep (dependent)7.7det (determiner)1.9pobj (propositional object)1.5As shown in Table3, dobj (direct object), nn (noun compound modifier), and nsubj (nominal subject) are the most common false dependencies, indicating that expletive ta was falsely construed as referential in these instances. As we can see, automatic syntactic parsing of special constructions in Chinese, such as expletive ta constructions, is far from satisfactory.As demonstrated by many empirical studies, linguistic knowledge can effectively improve the performance of dependency parsing ([11] and others). In the next section, we present an objective quantitative analysis of expletive ta constructions, attempting to provide linguistic knowledge for syntactic parsing of these constructions.


### 4.2. Characteristics of Expletiveta and Relative Constructions

#### 4.2.1. Dependencies: Indirect Object (iobj) and Expletive Subject (expl)

Based on the CCL data, we manually examined the distributional properties and semantic constraints of expletiveta constructions to clarify these constructions’ characteristics further. Firstly, there are mainly two types of constructions that allow expletive ta: V + ta + NP constructions and conditional clauses, which are usually introduced by the conjunction guan (‘no matter what’/‘regardless of’), as shown in Table 4.Table 4
Dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
DistributionDependencyRatio of instances (%)V + ta + NPIndirect object72.4Conditional clauseExpletive subject27.6It is worth noting that thoughta occurs in the postverbal position, that is, the object position in a V + ta + NP construction, it does not serve as the direct object of the verb as automatically parsed by the Stanford Parser. In generative grammar, it is generally assumed that objects are usually subcategorized by verbs and therefore theta-marked. Therefore, expletive pronouns can never appear in a theta-marked position since they are semantically empty. In traditional grammar, as mentioned earlier, such constructions are considered as pseudo-double object constructions, and expletive ta is considered a pseudo-object or an indirect object [2, 3, 12].Moreover, in a conditional clause such asguan ta youxie meixie (‘no matter whether one wears shoes or not’), expletive ta occupies the subject position. Here, ta does not refer to an entity. And the conditional clause is usually introduced by (bu) guan (‘no matter what’), which is a conjunction (see also Lü [18]: 523). Consequently, ta cannot be parsed as the direct object of (bu) guan, as falsely parsed by the Stanford Parser.


#### 4.2.2. Characteristics of theV + ta + NP Constructions

(1) Verbs in V + ta + NP Are Volitional Verbs. The verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are generally volitional [3]. We collected 974 instances of the V + ta + NP construction, and there are 280 verbs, of which only twenty-one are typical nonvolitional verbs out of context, as listed in Table 5.Table 5
Verb forms inV + ta + NP constructions.
TypeTokenExampleVolitional verb259934da ‘to hit,’ gan ‘to do,’ sha ‘to kill’Nonvolitional verb2140bing ‘to fall ill,’ zao ‘to suffer,’ si ‘to die’It is worth mentioning that nonvolitional verbs as listed above can be used as volitional verbs when they precede expletiveta (as is noted in Ma [32], some nonvolitional verbs can be used as volitional ones when occurring in an irrealis context.), as in example (3), where the verb si (‘to die’) is different from that in Ta si-le(‘He has been dead’) since the former means ‘to go to die,’ which is volitional. In other words, most of the verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are nonstative (since stative verbs are nonvolitional; see [32, 33]).(3)
Si ta ge guangrong.die it CL glory‘To die with glory.’Moreover, the verbs tend to be monosyllabic. Only a minority are disyllable words, as shown in Table6.Table 6
Monosyllabic and diphthong verbs inV + ta + NP constructions.
Monosyllable wordsDisyllable wordsVerbs91.1%8.9%Exampleda (‘hit’), shui (‘sleep’)bianlun (‘debate’), chengzhi (‘punish’)(2) High-Frequency Verbs in V + ta + NP. In general, both transitive and intransitive verbs can take expletive ta as an indirect (pseudo) object in Mandarin, as shown in Table 7, which lists the top 10 high-frequency words.Table 7
Top 10 high-frequency verbs.
VerbTokensda (‘to hit’)72gan (‘to do’)49sha (‘to kill’)36lai (‘to do’)33he (‘to drink’)30gao (‘to do’)26gei (‘to give’)22shui (‘to sleep’)22chi (‘to eat’)21zhuan (‘to earn’)14As can be seen from Table7, these are primarily regular transitive verbs (nine out of ten of the most frequently used verbs are regular transitive verbs), such as da (‘to hit’), gan (‘to do’), and sha (‘to kill’). However, intransitive verbs can also occur, as shown in the following examples:(4)
a.Wo xiang xia xianggang qu zhu ta ji-tian.I want go Hong Kong go live it several day‘I want to go to Hong Kong and stay several days’b.Ku ta ge tian-hun-di-an.cry it CL sky murky earth dark‘Have a really good cry.’Out of context, verbs such aszhu (‘to live’) and ku (‘to cry’) are subcategorized as intransitive because they do not identify an object. Nevertheless, in the above cases, the verb obligatorily takes an NP as its complement, such as the temporal expression ji-tian ‘several days’ in example (4a) and the resultative nominal ge tian-hun-di-an ‘a murky sky over a dark earth’ in example (4b). For this reason, the NPs are treated as ‘quasi-object NPs’ in the relevant literature [2, 3, 13]. Temporal expressions or resultative expressions as such, albeit usually treated as adjuncts, seem to function more as complements than as verb modifiers in the sense that their occurrence is obligatory, thus blurring the distinction between the argument and adjunct to some extent.(3) NP in V + ta + NP Constructions: Modified by Classifier ge or a Numeral. Importantly, NP in V + ta + NP constructions appears to be an indefinite nonspecific expression as has also been observed in Ma [3], Lin [4, 34], and Yuan [13]. This explains to some extent an nn (noun compound modifier) relation is often incorrectly detected during automatic parsing by the Stanford Parser.Specifically, the nonspecific indefinite NP consists solely of the classifierge or a numeral (the numerals here include the word ji ‘several’ and ban ‘half’; both indicate the number of entities).As can be seen from Table8, forty percent of the NPs consist of the classifier ge, whose occurrence nominalizes the post-ta elements. Sixty percent of the NPs begin with numerals such as yi (‘one’), san (‘three’), shi (‘ten’), and qian (‘thousand’). Bare NPs or definite NPs do not occur. On the question of why only nonspecific indefinite NPs are allowed, Lü [35] made an educated guess: when the NP is specific or definite, the pronominal form is interpreted as referential, as in Ta na-ge ren ting dou (‘He, that guy, is very funny’), where ta serves as an attribute of the definite NP na-ge ren (‘that guy’).Table 8
NPs inV + ta + NP.
NPRatio of instances (%)ExampleModified byge (CL)40ge gou ‘CL enough’ge xibalan ‘CL pieces’Modified by a numeral60shi nian ‘ten years’liangbei ‘two glasses’(4) Irrealis Contexts of V + ta + NP Constructions. It is generally assumed that expletive ta can only occur in an irrealis context (see, e.g., [35–37]), and the verb preceding ta cannot take an aspect marker such as le or guo (see [3, 8, 38]). We found that the above description is essentially correct, as shown in Table 9. However, we also noticed that there are several exceptions, which allow the occurrence of aspect markers.Table 9
Contexts of expletiveta.
ContextRatio of instances (%)ExampleIrrealis context98.9Wo yao haohao shui ta san-tian (‘I want to have a sleep for three days’)Realis context1.1Women lian tiao-leta san-tian sanye-de wu (‘We kept dancing for three days’)Piaozhe ta niaoniao chuiyan (‘The smoke is curling up’)


#### 4.2.3. Characteristics of the Conditional Clause

(1) (bu) Guan as the Conjunction. In conditional clauses, expletive ta comes after a conjunction with the meaning ‘no matter what,’ and the most commonly used conjunction is (bu)guan, as shown in Table 10. In Classic Chinese, the conjunction (bu)guan functioned as a verb. According to Wu [44], the conjunctive use of bu-guan (‘no matter what’) developed during the Tang and the Five Dynasties. Wang (2008) identified fifteen examples of conjunctive use of guan before the expletive subject ta in Zhuzi Yulei ’Classified Conversations of Zhu Xi’ (a Song Dynasty classic). He proposed that guan must have gone through a grammaticalization process to allow the co-occurrence of the expletive subject ta. Guan was semantically bleached. Moreover, guan was located at a sentence-initial position, which is “a preferred locus for processes of grammaticalization” (Auer [45], p. 297).Table 10
Conjunctions introducing a conditional clause.
ConjunctionToken(bu)guan (‘no matter what’)368ren (‘no matter what’)2napa (‘no matter how’)2(2) Three Categories of Predicates in the Conditional Clause. As shown in Table 11, the predicates in the conditional clause containing expletive ta can be statistically divided into three categories: constituent containing an interrogative word, coordinate constituent (A-and-B or A-not-A), and a null form.Table 11
Predicates in the conditional clause of(bu)guan ta.
CategoryRatio of tokens (%)Interrogative form31Coordinate form (A-not-A or A-and-B)35Null form27.6Others6.4Interestingly, sentences consisting of interrogative words such as shenme (‘what’), shui (‘who’), zenme (‘how’), sha (‘what’), and duoshao (‘how many/much’) do not express interrogative meanings. Instead, they have a noninterrogative indefinite interpretation or, more precisely, a universal quantification interpretation as shown in example (5) (Li [46] points out that conditionals allow an indefinite Wh freely). In (5), sai shenme ‘compete what’ (this is the word-by-word translation) means “any contest,” instead of questioning which contest it is.(5)
Guan ta sai shenme, nimen de huoshi cha buliao.No matter what it compete what you DE meal poor not‘No matter what contest you take part in, your meal would not be poor.’In a coordinated constituent, the coordinated elements provide alternative conditions to choose from. If we take as an example an A-and-B structure, as shown in example (6), A and B are coordinate in form while generic in meaning. In (6), the element Ashi youpai ye hao (‘be it the Right’) and the element B zuopai ye hao (‘be it the Left’) provide two opposite conditions to choose from, while no matter under which condition, the result in the main clause would remain the same.(6)
Ruguo zhishi guoguo danchun de richang shenghuo de-hua,if only live live simple DE everyday life ifguan ta shi youpai ye-hao,zuopai yehao,duino matter it be the Right as well the Left as well towo laishuo genben meiyou shenme chabieme for completely not have what difference‘As for everyday life, no matter what I am, the Right or the Left, it does not make any difference to me.’Moreover, in addition to the above categories, there are some predicates in the null form (about 27.6%), as shown in example (7), some idiomatic expressions such assan-qi-ershiyi (‘three times seven equals twenty-one’) (about 2.3%), and a small number of clausal predicates (as has been pointed out in Chao [1], clausal predicate is prevalent in Chinese).(7)
Zan dezui ren duo la,guan ta ne.We offend people many particle (PAR) no matter it PAR‘We have offended many people, but who cares.’


## 4.1. Automatic Parsing Results

### 4.1.1. Low Automatic Parsing Accuracy

We first examined the accuracy rate of dependencies with respect to expletiveta, including head-dependent relation and dependencies. The results show that the dependency accuracy of parsing special constructions is much lower than the mean accuracy of 82.16% for literary or 85.82% for nonliterary texts (Liu and Zhang [29]). In the current study of expletive ta constructions, only 29.3% of the head-dependent relations were correctly identified, and the dependencies were all incorrectly annotated, as illustrated in Table 2.Table 2
Accuracy of dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Head-dependent relation (%)Dependency (%)Expletiveta-related nodes29.30


### 4.1.2. Various Spurious Dependencies

Next, we scrutinized the dependencies related to expletiveta and found that several dependencies had been falsely recognized, as shown in Table 3.Table 3
False dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Dependency ofta-related nodesRatio (%)dobj (direct object)35.8nn (noun compound modifier)30.7nsubj (nominal subject)22.5dep (dependent)7.7det (determiner)1.9pobj (propositional object)1.5As shown in Table3, dobj (direct object), nn (noun compound modifier), and nsubj (nominal subject) are the most common false dependencies, indicating that expletive ta was falsely construed as referential in these instances. As we can see, automatic syntactic parsing of special constructions in Chinese, such as expletive ta constructions, is far from satisfactory.As demonstrated by many empirical studies, linguistic knowledge can effectively improve the performance of dependency parsing ([11] and others). In the next section, we present an objective quantitative analysis of expletive ta constructions, attempting to provide linguistic knowledge for syntactic parsing of these constructions.


## 4.1.1. Low Automatic Parsing Accuracy

We first examined the accuracy rate of dependencies with respect to expletiveta, including head-dependent relation and dependencies. The results show that the dependency accuracy of parsing special constructions is much lower than the mean accuracy of 82.16% for literary or 85.82% for nonliterary texts (Liu and Zhang [29]). In the current study of expletive ta constructions, only 29.3% of the head-dependent relations were correctly identified, and the dependencies were all incorrectly annotated, as illustrated in Table 2.Table 2
Accuracy of dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Head-dependent relation (%)Dependency (%)Expletiveta-related nodes29.30


## 4.1.2. Various Spurious Dependencies

Next, we scrutinized the dependencies related to expletiveta and found that several dependencies had been falsely recognized, as shown in Table 3.Table 3
False dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
Dependency ofta-related nodesRatio (%)dobj (direct object)35.8nn (noun compound modifier)30.7nsubj (nominal subject)22.5dep (dependent)7.7det (determiner)1.9pobj (propositional object)1.5As shown in Table3, dobj (direct object), nn (noun compound modifier), and nsubj (nominal subject) are the most common false dependencies, indicating that expletive ta was falsely construed as referential in these instances. As we can see, automatic syntactic parsing of special constructions in Chinese, such as expletive ta constructions, is far from satisfactory.As demonstrated by many empirical studies, linguistic knowledge can effectively improve the performance of dependency parsing ([11] and others). In the next section, we present an objective quantitative analysis of expletive ta constructions, attempting to provide linguistic knowledge for syntactic parsing of these constructions.


## 4.2. Characteristics of Expletiveta and Relative Constructions

### 4.2.1. Dependencies: Indirect Object (iobj) and Expletive Subject (expl)

Based on the CCL data, we manually examined the distributional properties and semantic constraints of expletiveta constructions to clarify these constructions’ characteristics further. Firstly, there are mainly two types of constructions that allow expletive ta: V + ta + NP constructions and conditional clauses, which are usually introduced by the conjunction guan (‘no matter what’/‘regardless of’), as shown in Table 4.Table 4
Dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
DistributionDependencyRatio of instances (%)V + ta + NPIndirect object72.4Conditional clauseExpletive subject27.6It is worth noting that thoughta occurs in the postverbal position, that is, the object position in a V + ta + NP construction, it does not serve as the direct object of the verb as automatically parsed by the Stanford Parser. In generative grammar, it is generally assumed that objects are usually subcategorized by verbs and therefore theta-marked. Therefore, expletive pronouns can never appear in a theta-marked position since they are semantically empty. In traditional grammar, as mentioned earlier, such constructions are considered as pseudo-double object constructions, and expletive ta is considered a pseudo-object or an indirect object [2, 3, 12].Moreover, in a conditional clause such asguan ta youxie meixie (‘no matter whether one wears shoes or not’), expletive ta occupies the subject position. Here, ta does not refer to an entity. And the conditional clause is usually introduced by (bu) guan (‘no matter what’), which is a conjunction (see also Lü [18]: 523). Consequently, ta cannot be parsed as the direct object of (bu) guan, as falsely parsed by the Stanford Parser.


### 4.2.2. Characteristics of theV + ta + NP Constructions

(1) Verbs in V + ta + NP Are Volitional Verbs. The verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are generally volitional [3]. We collected 974 instances of the V + ta + NP construction, and there are 280 verbs, of which only twenty-one are typical nonvolitional verbs out of context, as listed in Table 5.Table 5
Verb forms inV + ta + NP constructions.
TypeTokenExampleVolitional verb259934da ‘to hit,’ gan ‘to do,’ sha ‘to kill’Nonvolitional verb2140bing ‘to fall ill,’ zao ‘to suffer,’ si ‘to die’It is worth mentioning that nonvolitional verbs as listed above can be used as volitional verbs when they precede expletiveta (as is noted in Ma [32], some nonvolitional verbs can be used as volitional ones when occurring in an irrealis context.), as in example (3), where the verb si (‘to die’) is different from that in Ta si-le(‘He has been dead’) since the former means ‘to go to die,’ which is volitional. In other words, most of the verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are nonstative (since stative verbs are nonvolitional; see [32, 33]).(3)
Si ta ge guangrong.die it CL glory‘To die with glory.’Moreover, the verbs tend to be monosyllabic. Only a minority are disyllable words, as shown in Table6.Table 6
Monosyllabic and diphthong verbs inV + ta + NP constructions.
Monosyllable wordsDisyllable wordsVerbs91.1%8.9%Exampleda (‘hit’), shui (‘sleep’)bianlun (‘debate’), chengzhi (‘punish’)(2) High-Frequency Verbs in V + ta + NP. In general, both transitive and intransitive verbs can take expletive ta as an indirect (pseudo) object in Mandarin, as shown in Table 7, which lists the top 10 high-frequency words.Table 7
Top 10 high-frequency verbs.
VerbTokensda (‘to hit’)72gan (‘to do’)49sha (‘to kill’)36lai (‘to do’)33he (‘to drink’)30gao (‘to do’)26gei (‘to give’)22shui (‘to sleep’)22chi (‘to eat’)21zhuan (‘to earn’)14As can be seen from Table7, these are primarily regular transitive verbs (nine out of ten of the most frequently used verbs are regular transitive verbs), such as da (‘to hit’), gan (‘to do’), and sha (‘to kill’). However, intransitive verbs can also occur, as shown in the following examples:(4)
a.Wo xiang xia xianggang qu zhu ta ji-tian.I want go Hong Kong go live it several day‘I want to go to Hong Kong and stay several days’b.Ku ta ge tian-hun-di-an.cry it CL sky murky earth dark‘Have a really good cry.’Out of context, verbs such aszhu (‘to live’) and ku (‘to cry’) are subcategorized as intransitive because they do not identify an object. Nevertheless, in the above cases, the verb obligatorily takes an NP as its complement, such as the temporal expression ji-tian ‘several days’ in example (4a) and the resultative nominal ge tian-hun-di-an ‘a murky sky over a dark earth’ in example (4b). For this reason, the NPs are treated as ‘quasi-object NPs’ in the relevant literature [2, 3, 13]. Temporal expressions or resultative expressions as such, albeit usually treated as adjuncts, seem to function more as complements than as verb modifiers in the sense that their occurrence is obligatory, thus blurring the distinction between the argument and adjunct to some extent.(3) NP in V + ta + NP Constructions: Modified by Classifier ge or a Numeral. Importantly, NP in V + ta + NP constructions appears to be an indefinite nonspecific expression as has also been observed in Ma [3], Lin [4, 34], and Yuan [13]. This explains to some extent an nn (noun compound modifier) relation is often incorrectly detected during automatic parsing by the Stanford Parser.Specifically, the nonspecific indefinite NP consists solely of the classifierge or a numeral (the numerals here include the word ji ‘several’ and ban ‘half’; both indicate the number of entities).As can be seen from Table8, forty percent of the NPs consist of the classifier ge, whose occurrence nominalizes the post-ta elements. Sixty percent of the NPs begin with numerals such as yi (‘one’), san (‘three’), shi (‘ten’), and qian (‘thousand’). Bare NPs or definite NPs do not occur. On the question of why only nonspecific indefinite NPs are allowed, Lü [35] made an educated guess: when the NP is specific or definite, the pronominal form is interpreted as referential, as in Ta na-ge ren ting dou (‘He, that guy, is very funny’), where ta serves as an attribute of the definite NP na-ge ren (‘that guy’).Table 8
NPs inV + ta + NP.
NPRatio of instances (%)ExampleModified byge (CL)40ge gou ‘CL enough’ge xibalan ‘CL pieces’Modified by a numeral60shi nian ‘ten years’liangbei ‘two glasses’(4) Irrealis Contexts of V + ta + NP Constructions. It is generally assumed that expletive ta can only occur in an irrealis context (see, e.g., [35–37]), and the verb preceding ta cannot take an aspect marker such as le or guo (see [3, 8, 38]). We found that the above description is essentially correct, as shown in Table 9. However, we also noticed that there are several exceptions, which allow the occurrence of aspect markers.Table 9
Contexts of expletiveta.
ContextRatio of instances (%)ExampleIrrealis context98.9Wo yao haohao shui ta san-tian (‘I want to have a sleep for three days’)Realis context1.1Women lian tiao-leta san-tian sanye-de wu (‘We kept dancing for three days’)Piaozhe ta niaoniao chuiyan (‘The smoke is curling up’)


### 4.2.3. Characteristics of the Conditional Clause

(1) (bu) Guan as the Conjunction. In conditional clauses, expletive ta comes after a conjunction with the meaning ‘no matter what,’ and the most commonly used conjunction is (bu)guan, as shown in Table 10. In Classic Chinese, the conjunction (bu)guan functioned as a verb. According to Wu [44], the conjunctive use of bu-guan (‘no matter what’) developed during the Tang and the Five Dynasties. Wang (2008) identified fifteen examples of conjunctive use of guan before the expletive subject ta in Zhuzi Yulei ’Classified Conversations of Zhu Xi’ (a Song Dynasty classic). He proposed that guan must have gone through a grammaticalization process to allow the co-occurrence of the expletive subject ta. Guan was semantically bleached. Moreover, guan was located at a sentence-initial position, which is “a preferred locus for processes of grammaticalization” (Auer [45], p. 297).Table 10
Conjunctions introducing a conditional clause.
ConjunctionToken(bu)guan (‘no matter what’)368ren (‘no matter what’)2napa (‘no matter how’)2(2) Three Categories of Predicates in the Conditional Clause. As shown in Table 11, the predicates in the conditional clause containing expletive ta can be statistically divided into three categories: constituent containing an interrogative word, coordinate constituent (A-and-B or A-not-A), and a null form.Table 11
Predicates in the conditional clause of(bu)guan ta.
CategoryRatio of tokens (%)Interrogative form31Coordinate form (A-not-A or A-and-B)35Null form27.6Others6.4Interestingly, sentences consisting of interrogative words such as shenme (‘what’), shui (‘who’), zenme (‘how’), sha (‘what’), and duoshao (‘how many/much’) do not express interrogative meanings. Instead, they have a noninterrogative indefinite interpretation or, more precisely, a universal quantification interpretation as shown in example (5) (Li [46] points out that conditionals allow an indefinite Wh freely). In (5), sai shenme ‘compete what’ (this is the word-by-word translation) means “any contest,” instead of questioning which contest it is.(5)
Guan ta sai shenme, nimen de huoshi cha buliao.No matter what it compete what you DE meal poor not‘No matter what contest you take part in, your meal would not be poor.’In a coordinated constituent, the coordinated elements provide alternative conditions to choose from. If we take as an example an A-and-B structure, as shown in example (6), A and B are coordinate in form while generic in meaning. In (6), the element Ashi youpai ye hao (‘be it the Right’) and the element B zuopai ye hao (‘be it the Left’) provide two opposite conditions to choose from, while no matter under which condition, the result in the main clause would remain the same.(6)
Ruguo zhishi guoguo danchun de richang shenghuo de-hua,if only live live simple DE everyday life ifguan ta shi youpai ye-hao,zuopai yehao,duino matter it be the Right as well the Left as well towo laishuo genben meiyou shenme chabieme for completely not have what difference‘As for everyday life, no matter what I am, the Right or the Left, it does not make any difference to me.’Moreover, in addition to the above categories, there are some predicates in the null form (about 27.6%), as shown in example (7), some idiomatic expressions such assan-qi-ershiyi (‘three times seven equals twenty-one’) (about 2.3%), and a small number of clausal predicates (as has been pointed out in Chao [1], clausal predicate is prevalent in Chinese).(7)
Zan dezui ren duo la,guan ta ne.We offend people many particle (PAR) no matter it PAR‘We have offended many people, but who cares.’


## 4.2.1. Dependencies: Indirect Object (iobj) and Expletive Subject (expl)

Based on the CCL data, we manually examined the distributional properties and semantic constraints of expletiveta constructions to clarify these constructions’ characteristics further. Firstly, there are mainly two types of constructions that allow expletive ta: V + ta + NP constructions and conditional clauses, which are usually introduced by the conjunction guan (‘no matter what’/‘regardless of’), as shown in Table 4.Table 4
Dependencies of expletiveta-related nodes.
DistributionDependencyRatio of instances (%)V + ta + NPIndirect object72.4Conditional clauseExpletive subject27.6It is worth noting that thoughta occurs in the postverbal position, that is, the object position in a V + ta + NP construction, it does not serve as the direct object of the verb as automatically parsed by the Stanford Parser. In generative grammar, it is generally assumed that objects are usually subcategorized by verbs and therefore theta-marked. Therefore, expletive pronouns can never appear in a theta-marked position since they are semantically empty. In traditional grammar, as mentioned earlier, such constructions are considered as pseudo-double object constructions, and expletive ta is considered a pseudo-object or an indirect object [2, 3, 12].Moreover, in a conditional clause such asguan ta youxie meixie (‘no matter whether one wears shoes or not’), expletive ta occupies the subject position. Here, ta does not refer to an entity. And the conditional clause is usually introduced by (bu) guan (‘no matter what’), which is a conjunction (see also Lü [18]: 523). Consequently, ta cannot be parsed as the direct object of (bu) guan, as falsely parsed by the Stanford Parser.


## 4.2.2. Characteristics of theV + ta + NP Constructions

(1) Verbs in V + ta + NP Are Volitional Verbs. The verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are generally volitional [3]. We collected 974 instances of the V + ta + NP construction, and there are 280 verbs, of which only twenty-one are typical nonvolitional verbs out of context, as listed in Table 5.Table 5
Verb forms inV + ta + NP constructions.
TypeTokenExampleVolitional verb259934da ‘to hit,’ gan ‘to do,’ sha ‘to kill’Nonvolitional verb2140bing ‘to fall ill,’ zao ‘to suffer,’ si ‘to die’It is worth mentioning that nonvolitional verbs as listed above can be used as volitional verbs when they precede expletiveta (as is noted in Ma [32], some nonvolitional verbs can be used as volitional ones when occurring in an irrealis context.), as in example (3), where the verb si (‘to die’) is different from that in Ta si-le(‘He has been dead’) since the former means ‘to go to die,’ which is volitional. In other words, most of the verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are nonstative (since stative verbs are nonvolitional; see [32, 33]).(3)
Si ta ge guangrong.die it CL glory‘To die with glory.’Moreover, the verbs tend to be monosyllabic. Only a minority are disyllable words, as shown in Table6.Table 6
Monosyllabic and diphthong verbs inV + ta + NP constructions.
Monosyllable wordsDisyllable wordsVerbs91.1%8.9%Exampleda (‘hit’), shui (‘sleep’)bianlun (‘debate’), chengzhi (‘punish’)(2) High-Frequency Verbs in V + ta + NP. In general, both transitive and intransitive verbs can take expletive ta as an indirect (pseudo) object in Mandarin, as shown in Table 7, which lists the top 10 high-frequency words.Table 7
Top 10 high-frequency verbs.
VerbTokensda (‘to hit’)72gan (‘to do’)49sha (‘to kill’)36lai (‘to do’)33he (‘to drink’)30gao (‘to do’)26gei (‘to give’)22shui (‘to sleep’)22chi (‘to eat’)21zhuan (‘to earn’)14As can be seen from Table7, these are primarily regular transitive verbs (nine out of ten of the most frequently used verbs are regular transitive verbs), such as da (‘to hit’), gan (‘to do’), and sha (‘to kill’). However, intransitive verbs can also occur, as shown in the following examples:(4)
a.Wo xiang xia xianggang qu zhu ta ji-tian.I want go Hong Kong go live it several day‘I want to go to Hong Kong and stay several days’b.Ku ta ge tian-hun-di-an.cry it CL sky murky earth dark‘Have a really good cry.’Out of context, verbs such aszhu (‘to live’) and ku (‘to cry’) are subcategorized as intransitive because they do not identify an object. Nevertheless, in the above cases, the verb obligatorily takes an NP as its complement, such as the temporal expression ji-tian ‘several days’ in example (4a) and the resultative nominal ge tian-hun-di-an ‘a murky sky over a dark earth’ in example (4b). For this reason, the NPs are treated as ‘quasi-object NPs’ in the relevant literature [2, 3, 13]. Temporal expressions or resultative expressions as such, albeit usually treated as adjuncts, seem to function more as complements than as verb modifiers in the sense that their occurrence is obligatory, thus blurring the distinction between the argument and adjunct to some extent.(3) NP in V + ta + NP Constructions: Modified by Classifier ge or a Numeral. Importantly, NP in V + ta + NP constructions appears to be an indefinite nonspecific expression as has also been observed in Ma [3], Lin [4, 34], and Yuan [13]. This explains to some extent an nn (noun compound modifier) relation is often incorrectly detected during automatic parsing by the Stanford Parser.Specifically, the nonspecific indefinite NP consists solely of the classifierge or a numeral (the numerals here include the word ji ‘several’ and ban ‘half’; both indicate the number of entities).As can be seen from Table8, forty percent of the NPs consist of the classifier ge, whose occurrence nominalizes the post-ta elements. Sixty percent of the NPs begin with numerals such as yi (‘one’), san (‘three’), shi (‘ten’), and qian (‘thousand’). Bare NPs or definite NPs do not occur. On the question of why only nonspecific indefinite NPs are allowed, Lü [35] made an educated guess: when the NP is specific or definite, the pronominal form is interpreted as referential, as in Ta na-ge ren ting dou (‘He, that guy, is very funny’), where ta serves as an attribute of the definite NP na-ge ren (‘that guy’).Table 8
NPs inV + ta + NP.
NPRatio of instances (%)ExampleModified byge (CL)40ge gou ‘CL enough’ge xibalan ‘CL pieces’Modified by a numeral60shi nian ‘ten years’liangbei ‘two glasses’(4) Irrealis Contexts of V + ta + NP Constructions. It is generally assumed that expletive ta can only occur in an irrealis context (see, e.g., [35–37]), and the verb preceding ta cannot take an aspect marker such as le or guo (see [3, 8, 38]). We found that the above description is essentially correct, as shown in Table 9. However, we also noticed that there are several exceptions, which allow the occurrence of aspect markers.Table 9
Contexts of expletiveta.
ContextRatio of instances (%)ExampleIrrealis context98.9Wo yao haohao shui ta san-tian (‘I want to have a sleep for three days’)Realis context1.1Women lian tiao-leta san-tian sanye-de wu (‘We kept dancing for three days’)Piaozhe ta niaoniao chuiyan (‘The smoke is curling up’)


## 4.2.3. Characteristics of the Conditional Clause

(1) (bu) Guan as the Conjunction. In conditional clauses, expletive ta comes after a conjunction with the meaning ‘no matter what,’ and the most commonly used conjunction is (bu)guan, as shown in Table 10. In Classic Chinese, the conjunction (bu)guan functioned as a verb. According to Wu [44], the conjunctive use of bu-guan (‘no matter what’) developed during the Tang and the Five Dynasties. Wang (2008) identified fifteen examples of conjunctive use of guan before the expletive subject ta in Zhuzi Yulei ’Classified Conversations of Zhu Xi’ (a Song Dynasty classic). He proposed that guan must have gone through a grammaticalization process to allow the co-occurrence of the expletive subject ta. Guan was semantically bleached. Moreover, guan was located at a sentence-initial position, which is “a preferred locus for processes of grammaticalization” (Auer [45], p. 297).Table 10
Conjunctions introducing a conditional clause.
ConjunctionToken(bu)guan (‘no matter what’)368ren (‘no matter what’)2napa (‘no matter how’)2(2) Three Categories of Predicates in the Conditional Clause. As shown in Table 11, the predicates in the conditional clause containing expletive ta can be statistically divided into three categories: constituent containing an interrogative word, coordinate constituent (A-and-B or A-not-A), and a null form.Table 11
Predicates in the conditional clause of(bu)guan ta.
CategoryRatio of tokens (%)Interrogative form31Coordinate form (A-not-A or A-and-B)35Null form27.6Others6.4Interestingly, sentences consisting of interrogative words such as shenme (‘what’), shui (‘who’), zenme (‘how’), sha (‘what’), and duoshao (‘how many/much’) do not express interrogative meanings. Instead, they have a noninterrogative indefinite interpretation or, more precisely, a universal quantification interpretation as shown in example (5) (Li [46] points out that conditionals allow an indefinite Wh freely). In (5), sai shenme ‘compete what’ (this is the word-by-word translation) means “any contest,” instead of questioning which contest it is.(5)
Guan ta sai shenme, nimen de huoshi cha buliao.No matter what it compete what you DE meal poor not‘No matter what contest you take part in, your meal would not be poor.’In a coordinated constituent, the coordinated elements provide alternative conditions to choose from. If we take as an example an A-and-B structure, as shown in example (6), A and B are coordinate in form while generic in meaning. In (6), the element Ashi youpai ye hao (‘be it the Right’) and the element B zuopai ye hao (‘be it the Left’) provide two opposite conditions to choose from, while no matter under which condition, the result in the main clause would remain the same.(6)
Ruguo zhishi guoguo danchun de richang shenghuo de-hua,if only live live simple DE everyday life ifguan ta shi youpai ye-hao,zuopai yehao,duino matter it be the Right as well the Left as well towo laishuo genben meiyou shenme chabieme for completely not have what difference‘As for everyday life, no matter what I am, the Right or the Left, it does not make any difference to me.’Moreover, in addition to the above categories, there are some predicates in the null form (about 27.6%), as shown in example (7), some idiomatic expressions such assan-qi-ershiyi (‘three times seven equals twenty-one’) (about 2.3%), and a small number of clausal predicates (as has been pointed out in Chao [1], clausal predicate is prevalent in Chinese).(7)
Zan dezui ren duo la,guan ta ne.We offend people many particle (PAR) no matter it PAR‘We have offended many people, but who cares.’


## 5. Discussion

As mentioned earlier, the syntactic properties and semantic constraints of expletiveta remain controversial in the existing literature, mainly because the scholars conduct a qualitative study and focus only on certain aspects of expletive ta and relative constructions. The current data-driven study shows that some observations made by traditional grammarians are fundamentally correct, while others are not. Section 4 shows that the verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are mostly volitional verbs and monosyllabic words and that expletive ta tends to occur in irrealis contexts, which is consistent with Ma’s [3] and many others’ observations. However, we also show that there are a few exceptions such as disyllable words and realis contexts that allow the aspect marker le or zhe, contrary to the viewpoint of Lin and Zhang [8] and others. Moreover, we found that the NP in the V + ta + NP construction can be an indefinite nominal phrase modified by the classifier ge, or by a numeral, rendering untenable Lei and Hu’s [15] claim that ta ge is a compound word. However, the properties described in the above section are tendencies rather than rigid constraints.Expletive elements have raised significant issues about the interface between syntax and semantics, particularly the relationship between syntactic subcategorization and theta-role assignment, and the nature of the subject-predicate relation (see [39–41]). Given the subcategorization properties and theta-role assignment abilities of verbs, it is assumed that object positions are always theta-marked, which precludes the occurrence of the non-theta-marked semantically vacuous expletives. This assumption led Rothstein [5–7] to claim that “there can be no such thing as an object pleonastic” based on her structural theory of predication. The central claim of the structural view of predication is that “predication is a syntactic relation which is independent of theta-role assignment holding between a predicate and a nonpredicate (its ‘subject’)” [6]. She points out that syntactic constituents such as non-theta-marked maximal projections (e.g., VPs, APs, PPs, and other XPs, including some NPs) are predicates. The subjects of syntactic predicates are projected syntactically according to the predication condition (all syntactic predicates must have a subject) and not thematically. In Section 4, we show that Rothstein’s structural theory of predication is problematic when considering Mandarin data since 72.4% of the instances of expletive ta occur in postverbal positions, namely, the indirect object position.Theoretically, the occurrence of expletives in subject positions is to satisfy the extended projection principle, which states that every sentence has a subject or the predication condition, which requires that all syntactic predicates must have subjects. Therefore, in pro-drop languages such as Mandarin Chinese, in which subject NPs can be easily dropped, expletive subjects are reasonably unexpected, as hypothesized by Wu and Cao [37]. The fact that subject expletives exist in pro-drop languages such as Mandarin suggests that their occurrences are not only due to syntactic requirements but also that pragmatic factors may sometimes play a significant role. Chao [1] already noted that the occurrence of expletive ta makes the sentence more vivid.As shown in Section4.1, expletive ta has created significant challenges to automatic syntactic parsing as all instances of ta were falsely construed by the Stanford Parser as referential and annotated with false dependencies. After a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the constructions at issue, as shown in Section 4.2, further work is expected to improve the accuracy of automatic syntactic parsing by implementing rule-based, probability-based, or combined methods. Several possible solutions can be tested in future research to identify expletive ta, such as formalizing rules according to the linguistic knowledge of Vs and NPs in V + ta + NP constructions and enriching the knowledge base of generalized function words of modern Chinese for information processing (Zan et.al. [42] and Zhang et.al. [43]), considering the conjunction bu(guan) in the conditional clauses.


## 6. Conclusion

We first extracted 1346 instances of Mandarin expletiveta constructions from CCL and investigated the automatic dependency parsing results of these constructions, showing that all instances containing expletive ta are taken as referential and misrecognized with various dependencies.We then conducted a detailed study of these constructions, hoping to shed some light on automatic syntactic analyses. Based on a quantitative exploration, we delineated the characteristics ofV + ta + NP constructions and (bu) guan ta conditional clauses. We showed that verbs in V + ta + NP constructions are mostly volitional and monosyllabic, and NPs are nonspecific indefinite NPs modified either by the classifier ge (CL) or a counting word. Semantically, expletive ta is basically restricted to an irrealis context. Moreover, in conditional clauses introduced by (bu) guan (‘no matter what’), expletive ta occupies the subject position, and the predicates usually consist of coordinate constituents or interrogative elements or a null form. It is worth noting that these features are tendencies rather than rigid constraints since there are some exceptions in the database. An experiment on testing the automatic syntactic parsing performance after employing the above-described linguistic knowledge of expletive ta constructions is expected in our future work.



---

*Source: 2156978-2022-02-22.xml*