Dependency Network Syntax From Dependency Treebanks to a Classification of Chinese Function Words

This article presents a new approach of us-ing dependency treebanks in theoretical syn-tactic research: the view of dependency treebanks as combined networks. This al-lows the usage of advanced tools for net-work analysis that quite easily provide novel insight into the syntactic structure of lan-guage. As an example of this approach, we will show how the network approach can provide clear structural distinctions among the Chinese function words, which are very difficult to obtain directly from the original treebank. We hope to illustrate the enor-mous potential of the language network ap