Component Sharing in E nglish and C hinese Clause Complex (2020)

Abstract: NT Clause Complex Framework defines a clause complex as a combination of NT clauses through component sharing and logic-semantic relationship. This paper clarifies the existence of component sharing mechanism in both English and Chinese clause complexes, illustrates the differences in component sharing between the two languages, and introduces a formal annotation scheme to represent clause-complex level structural transformations. Under the guidance of the annotation scheme, the English-Chinese Clause Alignment Corpus is built. It is believed that this corpus will aid comparative linguistic studies, translation studies and machine translation studies by providing abundant formal and computable samples for English-Chinese structural transformations on the clause complex level.

## introduction natural language contains five grammatical levels: morpheme, word, phrase/group, clause, clause complex. elements of higher levels are constructed out of elements of the level next below @xcite @xcite . in terms of the structure of clause complex or sentence, the current predominant method for analysis is phrase-based, while the clause-based structural analysis is less discussed. the phrase-based analysis has yielded fruitful results. nevertheless, clause-based structural analysis is no less important, especially when discourse-level natural language processing is concerned. @xcite puts forward the nt clause complex framework, which provides a framework for clause-based analysis of clause complex structures. this paper is to illustrate the concept of component sharing in this framework, and to introduce a new perspective for understanding english-chinese translation based on component sharing. ## component sharing patterns and clause-complex level structural transformations corpus annotation has revealed that both english and chinese have 4 types of component sharing patterns, which include branch pattern, graft pattern, postposition pattern and influx pattern. however, the distribution of these patterns is quite different between the two languages. such differences lead to clause-complex level structural transformations in english-chinese translation. in this section, the graft pattern, as well as structural transformations on the clause complex level under this pattern, will be introduced. ## english-chinese clause alignment corpus following the formal annotation scheme, the english-chinese clause alignment corpus is built. the annotation objects of this corpus include the syntactic categories of english constructs, naming-telling relationship between constructs, translations of constructs, and the processes to combine translation units into wholesentence translation. operation functions for transforming features of translation units, as well as inserted chinese words, are designed. wall street journal newspapers in penn treebank are chosen for annotated. so far, about 5000 english clause complexes have been annotated, which comprise about 12000 english nt clauses. the annotations present component sharing between namings and tellings in english clause complexes, and the clause-complex level structural transformations between english and chinese. the corpus aims to provide formal and computable material for comparative linguistic studies, translation teaching and machine translation. it is still under construction and will be expanded in the future.