The Chinese Temporal Coverbs, Postpositions, Coverb-Postposition Pairs, and Their Temporal Logic

Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12), 18-20 Feb, 1998, 20-3 The Chinese Temporal Coverbs, Postpositions, Coverb-Postposition Pairs, and Their Temporal Logic York Chung-Ho YANG, June-Jei KUO Matsushita Electric Institute of Technology (Taipei) Co., Ltd., Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. E-mail: {york, kaku}@mitt.com.tw FAX: + 886 2 7556005 Abstract Some researches concerning the correspondence between the temporal features in English and other European languages have been done by Bree (1994). The subject of this paper is to collect and induce the temporal features of Chinese. The functionality of the Chinese temporal Coverbs, postpositions and Coverb-postposition pairs will be introduced Meanwhile, simple logic representation forms for Chinese temporal sentences will be proposed. The temporal taxonomy of Chinese has been defined and these definitions are also ready to be coded into a program for translation purpose. We develop a temporal representation language into which Chinese sentences involving temporal Coverbs, postpositions and Coverb-postposition pairs can be naturally translated. Keyword: Chinese Temporal Coverb, Chinese Temporal Postposition, Chinese Temporal Coverb-Postposition pair, Temporal Logic, Chinese Temporal Logic Representation. 1� Introduction Intuitively, humans can exhibit their thought, intellect and mind using their mothertongue effortlessly, although human languages are extremely variant and of great complexity. People usually can not be explicit about the rules of their own mothertongue of ambiguous words or phrase, whereas they can use their language appropriately in expression of their thought. Many linguists and psychologists have done numerous researches about this matter; however, it is still can not be made explicit how such knowledge of language is stored in our brain and how we use it (J.B. Gleason, 1993). Therefore, in order to find out some useful rules about languages, it is necessary to be restricted in different subdomains. The purpose of this paper is to give an applicable model in a subdomain of natural language processing (NLP) by computers. In this paper, we are going to submit the fundamental analyses of Chinese temporal Coverbs, postpositions and Coverb-postposition pairs. Many natural language processing between European languages and English with respect to temporals have been researched and implemented. For example, Bree (1992) defined the temporal subordinate conjunctions (SC) and prepositions as temporals. The temporals of European languages such as English, Dutch and German have been studied in detail. Bree, Smit & Werkhoven (1990) have compared English and Dutch temporals. Furthermore, Bree (1992) has discussed the temporals between English, Dutch and German. The completion of examining the temporals of the European languages does not entail the understanding of temporals of all languages over the world. As the result, in order to get a clearer picture of the use of temporals across languages, studies of the Chinese temporal representation is necessary. In this paper, we will study the temporals of Chinese and find some applicable rules in translation from Chinese temporals to logic symbols. In Chinese, a special collection of verbs called Coverb, has the same function as English prepositions. The Coverbs approach was introduced by Francis (1946) who defined the approach as below: Coverbs (CV) are transitive verbs which do …

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