[Corpora-List] Chinese and English POS

[Xing Fukun]

Hi,
Thanks very much for all the replies to my question. I will sum up all the relevent responses and share it with all the members later . 
Simon said the Chinese sentence in the last mail cannot be displayed. The sentence is:
一件 包装/v n 精美 的 礼品
a present with wonderful decoration
a present decorated wonderfully

Best regards

Xing





Xing Fukun
Phd candidate for Language Engineering
Center for Language Information Processing
Beijing Language and Cultural University
北京语言大学语言信息处理研究所
2009-11-02



发件人： simon smith
发送时间： 2009-11-02 21:06:33
收件人： xingfukun001 at gmail.com; CORPORA at uib.no; mike at lexically.net; Adam Kilgarriff
抄送： 
主题： Chinese and English POS

Hi everybody,
I am puzzled with the part of speech of "chief" in the phrase "the chief
executive officer". 


@Fukun

I think that your Chinese example sounds interesting, but unfortunately I can't read it. Can you try again, with a Unicode font?

"Chief" is a legitimate example of a word that has distinct noun and adjective readings. As an adjective it means "main" or "principal"; as a noun it means "person in charge". A "chief executive officer" is of course a "person in charge" too, but the "chief" part should still be analyzed as "main", I think.

@Mike: Can you say any more about the theory that words do not have a pre-determined POS? I have to confess I had always thought the interpretation of "church" in "church tower" as an adjective to be nothing more than a non-linguist's misunderstanding. 

It seems more economical to say that any noun can (in principle) modify any other noun, as part of a noun compound, than to record an additional POS, namely adjective, for every single noun in the lexicon. I would say, too, that there is no more reason to make out a special case for substance-item compounds, such as "gold watch" and "lead balloon", than there is for "radium watch" (G Pullum's example) or "iridium balloon". 

However, theories which assign POS elsewhere than in the lexicon would cause problems for that explanation (as well as for lexicographers, I would have thought).

Simon

歡迎以中文回信

Simon Smith, PhD
Assistant Professor
Foreign Language Center
National Chengchi University

政大外文中心助理教授

http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~smithsgj/
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