What is the Lexical Form of ‘BEI’?

WHAT IS THE LEXICAL FORM OF 'BEI'? Shun Ha Sylvia Wong and Peter Hancox School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom. E-mail: {S.Wong,P.J.Hancox} @cs.bham.ac.uk ABSTRACT The lexical representation of the Chinese word ‘4A: has been an issue of on-going debate. The lexical form suggested by Her seemed to provide a complete representation of the different syntactic behaviours of `4ht.' within a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) account. However, when applying this representa- tion in conjunction with the argument structure (a-structure) and the lexical mapping theory in LFG, this representation conflicts with the lexical mapping theory. This paper examines this problem and proposes a solution to the problem when dealing with the lexical representation of `16t'. 1. INTRODUCTION The Chinese word 'It' is an unusual lexical unit as it has two different linguistic behaviours (cf. Sec- tion 2). Due to this distinctive characteristic, the lexical representation of `tk.' has been a frequently discussed subject. The Chinese word 'It' is frequently being mistaken as a preposition. However, as argued by Tan [9] and Her [7], 'It' cannot be a preposition; it is indeed a verb. Tan [9] treated 'It' and its following noun phrase (NP) as a subordinate clause for making the meaning of a sentence more spe- cific. However, Her argued that Tan's argument structure of 'It' is incomplete. There are some forms of l'-sentences that Tan's argument structure failed to describe. The lexical form of 'It' suggested by Her can adequately predict and explain the different syntactic behaviours of `lbt' in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) terms. However, a problem arises when applying lexical mapping theory defined in the LFG formalism to Her's lexical form. In LFG, different levels of linguistic information is represented by different structures: constituent structure (c-structure), functional structure (f-structure), argument structure (a-structure) and semantic structure (s-structure) [2, 3, 6]. The linguistic information encoded in these structures ranges from pure syntax towards a certain level of semantics: Semantic Information some semantic information thematic information higher syntactic and functional information syntactic structure s structure a structure f structure c-structure Syntactic Information Lexical mapping theory [1, 4] defines the mapping between occurrences of syntactic functions in f- structures and occurrences of thematic roles in corresponding a-structures. If both the lexical form suggested by Her and the lexical mapping theory are correct and complete, there should not be any problem in applying lexical mapping theory to this lexical form. This paper discusses what goes wrong when applying lexical mapping theory to Her's lexical form and investigates the possible solutions to this problem. -169- 2. DIFFERENT SYNTACTIC BEHAVIOURS OF TEP-SENTENCES The Chinese word `49t.' has a syntactic behaviour which is unique within the Chinese language. On the one hand, ' tbt' -sentences can act as the passive alternatives of most active sentences while again conforming with the morpholexical transformation presented by Bresnan [2]: (1) (0BJ) -4 (SUBJ) (SUBJ) -4 (BY oBJ)/0 As shown in (1), the transformation of a sentence from active voice to passive voice involves two oper- …

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