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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 21:2 (2021) ► pp.298–322

Paraphrase and parallel treebank for the comparison of French and Chinese syntax

ORCID logo | University of Tsukuba , Japan
| Pompeu Fabra University , Spain
| Zhejiang University , China

This paper proposes to study the contrastive syntax of French and Chinese through the lens of syntactic mismatches, and by making use of parallel treebanks. A syntactic mismatch is the non-similarity between the syntactic structures of one linguistic unit and its translation. Syntactic mismatches are formalized using the notion of paraphrase from the Meaning-Text Theory, which allows for capturing mismatches at different levels of the linguistic description (e.g. Semantic, Deep-Syntactic, and Surface-Syntactic). In this paper, we report in details on the types of paraphrases found in the seed corpus used, demonstrating that the Deep-Syntactic paraphrases constitute the best starting point for our study. Then, we show how, starting from the seed corpus, we semi-automatically constructed a multi-layer parallel treebank with the alignment and annotation of paraphrases.

Keywords: Paraphrase, syntactic mismatch, Meaning-Text Theory, parallel treebank, Chinese/French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and theoretical framework
    • 2.1Contrastive syntax and syntactic mismatches
    • 2.2The formalization of syntactic mismatches
    • 2.3The Meaning-Text Theory
      • 2.3.1Representation levels
      • 2.3.2Actancial relations in the Meaning-Text Model
      • 2.3.3The modules of the MTM
  • 3.French-Chinese paraphrases in a literary corpus
    • 3.1Definition of a paraphrase
    • 3.2Semantic paraphrase
      • 3.2.1Semantic-Propositional paraphrase
        • a.Expansion/reduction
        • b.Addition/substraction
      • 3.2.2Semantic-Communicative paraphrase
    • 3.3Deep-Syntactic paraphrase
      • 3.3.1Synonymy: L ≡ Syn(L)
      • 3.3.2Antonymy: L ≡ Anti(L) + NOT
      • 3.3.3Conversion: L ≡ Convijkl(L)
      • 3.3.4Derivation: L ≡ Der(L)
    • 3.4Surface-Syntactic paraphrase
      • 3.4.1Different realization of a DSyntA
      • 3.4.2Pronominalization
  • 4.French-Chinese multi-layer parallel treebank construction
    • 4.1Automatic annotation of surface and deep syntactic layers
    • 4.2Deep-Syntactic paraphrases annotation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.20002.poi
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