Choice of coordinators in adjective phrases

What is it about?

In Mandarin, many coordinators can be used in conjoining adjectives to form phrases, including hé, ér, yòu, etc. It raises the question of how speakers choose one coordinator over the others. This study investigates various factors that affect the choice of coordinators and their relative strength of contribution. Using multinomial logistic regression model and corpus data from Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL), we examined seven factors that have been claimed to restrict the choice of coordinators and compared their relative strengths. The coordinators studied include hé, ér, yòu, éryòu, yòu…yòu…. and jì…yòu... The statistical model shows that six variables are significant, namely “syntactic position”, “number of syllables of conjuncts”, “semantic relation of conjuncts”, “presence of modifying elements”, “genre” and “number of conjuncts”. “Syntactic position” and “number of syllables of conjuncts” carry the highest weight. Keywords: coordinators, adjective phrases, logistic regression, syntactic position, number of syllables

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Keywords: coordinators, adjective phrases, logistic regression, syntactic position, number of syllables

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