Abstract of thesis entitled "Semantic Interpretation and Ambiguity in Chinese Serial Verb Constructions" by Alice Chan Yin Wa

This thesis examines the semantic interpretation and ambiguity in Chinese serial verb constructions. Serial verb constructions refer to constructions that contain two or more verb phrases or clauses juxtaposed together without any marker indicating the relationship between them. This study focuses on those constructions with two verb phrases denoting two separate events, which are argued to be canonical serial verb constructions. The verb phrases of these constructions are related to each other in a temporal way and can be seen as having a consecutive, alternating, purpose or circumstance relation.

The Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) approach to syntax is used as the framework for the syntactic analysis of the constructions. It is argued that constructions having the consecutive or alternating interpretations have a coordinate structure while those having the purpose or circumstance interpretations have a subordinate structure. The expanded Speaking/Event/Reference (SER) system is employed as the framework for the semantic analysis of the constructions, and formal criteria are established to govern their semantic interpretations. It is shown that the interpretations of a serial verb construction are governed by iconic principles, and so long as the formal criteria for a certain interpretation are satisfied, a serial verb construction can be argued to receive that interpretation semantically although pragmatic constraints may help to delimit the kind of possible interpretations it may have in the human world.

It is also argued that there are inherent relations between the different interpretations of a serial verb construction. Although many constructions can receive more than one interpretation, only those having both the consecutive and purpose interpretations, and those having both the purpose and circumstance interpretations are regarded as genuinely ambiguous constructions because they are ambiguous both structurally and semantically.

The addition of aspect markers to genuinely ambiguous serial verb constructions is argued to have a disambiguation effect. When the progressive aspect marker zai, the perfective aspect marker -le, or the experiential aspect marker -guo is added to such serial verb constructions, the resultant sentences can be interpreted deterministically according to where the marker is inserted and the scope of the marker. The expanded SER system is again used to govern the semantic acceptability of the resultant constructions and the Head Feature Convention, together with the proposed Head features [PROG], [PFV] and [EXP], is used to govern the syntactic well-formedness of the resultant constructions. It is argued that the interpretations of the resultant constructions are not only semantically but also syntactically well-attested.

The formalisms presented in the thesis are computationally tractable, as both the syntactic structures and semantic interpretations asserted can be exploited computationally. The findings about the interaction of serial verb constructions and aspect markers represent a step forward in the area of natural language understanding, as the need for incorporating pragmatic information into a natural language processor for parsing such constructions can be minimized.