Number in Chinese: A corpus-based computational investigation

This article explores the notion of number and plurality in Chinese based on word collocation analysis in a large corpus. It has been argued that although plurality may not be expressed systematically or completely in Chinese, the grammatical category of number may be evident through the collocations of the words which could be analyzed as singular or plural under different semantic circumstances with or without overt marks. Using word similarity measurement techniques, different local contexts of words were extracted from a large corpus and analyzed for their contextual similarities. It may be concluded that singular and plural forms of a word may have a clear distinction in their collocation behavior, and a mark-less noun, i.e. a noun without any numeral or classifier to express its number explicitly, could behave just like a plural noun. ? 2013 Springer-Verlag.EI