Discusses the use of text retrieval methods based on probabilistic models with Chinese language material, which are modeled on the Okapi information retrieval system. Topics include system architecture, test collections, weighting functions, and algorithms. (Author/LRW)

Gives a brief history of the causes for the emergence of translation as a key to national survival and cultural change in China. Focuses on three significant translation phenomena: the role of translation as a vehicle for cultural change; the phenomenon of translating out of the mother tongue; and the relationship between translation and learning…

Discusses the role of imagination in Chinese culture and literature. Notes that Chinese children's literature has begun to deviate from themes of obedience and conformity, instead emphasizing themes of imagination and initiative. Lists several traditional Chinese stories translated into English. (MM)

Addresses "ziji," notorious long-distance reflexive in Chinese, which can take antecedent infinitively far away. Argues that theories concerned with anaphoric properties should be formed and evaluated on basis of following observations: no barriers can block anaphoric relation; and subjects of any clauses containing reflexive are its…

Deals with a major difference between European languages and Chinese, namely the sparse use of anaphoric reference in Chinese. Suggests that the translator's way of rendering references will affect the interpretational potential of the text in the target language. (NKA)

Argues that the contribution of pragmatics to anaphora is much more fundamental than has been commonly believed, at least with respect to languages such as Chinese. A pragmatic theory is presented of anaphora within the neo-Gricean framework of conversational implicature, and an overview is provided of the latest developments of Grice's theory of…

Suggests that, in some Fujian Southern Min dialects, the patterns VP-neg and Adv-VP are mutually exclusive, presenting data from Xiamen to show recent innovations in the yes-no question pattern. Describes this innovation, explaining how the origin of the innovative patterns and limitations on their further development are influenced by…

Discusses information retrieval in the Chinese language and describes three representation methods for texts: 1-gram or character, bigram, and short-word. Describes a study that investigated using more than one method simultaneously to improve retrieval effectiveness and considers word segmentation and costs. (Author/LRW)

Optional course choices were related to career aspirations as a follow-up to a survey of secondary-school students. Interviews with ethnic Chinese students (N=27) are reported. Three themes were found in responses; gender and ethnicity were not important themes. Findings are discussed in relation to other studies of Chinese ethnicity. (Author/EMK)

Attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. (Author/VWL)

Reports a study investigating the status of thematic verbs in second language acquisition (SLA) of Chinese by French-speaking, German-speaking, and English-speaking learners. Provides evidence that the thematic verb does not raise in SLA of Chinese, which casts doubt on the reliability of these hypotheses in the second language literature.…

Analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle "de" in the history of Chinese. Argues that grammaticalization is subject to influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. (Author/VWL)

At a time when many policymakers and business leaders are clamoring for American children to take up the languages of Asia and the Middle East to help buttress the United States' international competitiveness and national security, the policies and resources are as much of a mismatch as the languages that are being taught. More than 90 percent of…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…

In multilingual Asian communities, determining language dominance for clinical assessment and intervention is often complex. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report classification tool for identifying the dominant language in English-Mandarin bilinguals. Participants (N = 168) completed a questionnaire on language history and…