A Chinese-english Synergetic Syntactic Model Based On Dependency Relations

Language is a human-driven,multi-level complex adaptive and self-adjusting system,hence the feasibility and necessity of employing systems theory to study language.Synergetics,as a branch of systems theory,provides an interdisciplinary approach to modelling certain dynamic aspects of systems through examining the interrelations among system elements.Synergetic linguistics studies linguistics following the synergetic approach.K?hler proposed a syntactic synergetic model based on the framework of phrase-structure grammar.The study of syntax basically relies on its research framework and the previous model does not suffice to describe relations among system elements at the level of syntax.Dependency grammar accents the relations among words and constitutes a better framework for the descriptions of language structures.Hence it's necessary to construct a synergetic model based on dependency grammar.The study discovers the distribution patterns of syntactic elements based on dependency relations,the interrelations among the elements and impact from external factors,and on the basis of these discoveries,constructs a Chinese-English synergetic syntactic model based on dependency and valency relations.It uses large-scale authentic language data—two dependency news treebanks,one in Chinese and one in English to discover the common linguistic and structural regularities at a syntactic level.Both corpora are divided into 6 sub-corpora of equivalent sizes.The study yields the following findings.The distribution patterns of 12 units/properties based on dependency grammar are examined.They all abide by certain Zipf-related distributions,thus establishing themselves as basic language entities and as products from diversification processes.These 12 units/properties constitute 3 groups:A)dependency-related units/properties like dependency distance and the 7 various combinations of the components of a complete dependency structure“dependent(POS)+governor(POS)=dependency relation/syntactic function”,B)valency-related units/properties like generalized valencies(numbers of dependents)and valency patterns,and C)other units/properties like positions,layers,node-related sub-tree lengths,sentence lengths,dependency tree widths and heights.The combination of“POS+valency”obeys a Zipf-related distribution model,giving rise to the proposal of the term“probabilistic POS valency capacity pattern”.The interrelation between dependency relations and parts of speech(POS)is found to be of much regularity,and is the statistical basis for the proposal of the ideas of dependency-based“polyfunctionality”and“synfunctionality”,which give rise to“probabilistic function patterns”and support the previously researched“probabilistic valency patterns”.The general variation tendency of dependency distance is discussed.The ranking orders of increasing positive and negative distance change alternatively.Four triangular interrelations among syntactic properties/variables are examined.A).A power law function y=ax~bcaptures the links among sentence lengths,POS types and dependency relation types within sentences.B).The previous power law function captures the interrelation between tree heights/widths and sentence lengths.A logistic function models the link between dependency tree widths and heights.The product of the widest layer and its width approximates the sentence length.C).A positive negative binomial function captures the links among valencies,lengths and dependency distances.D).Linear positions are related to sub-tree lengths positively in Chinese but negatively in English.The Good function captures the link between tree-layer related positions and sub-tree lengths.The positions of nodes at the second tree layer with the same dependency relations follow an extended positive binomial distribution pattern.E).A positive negative binomial function captures the link between valencies and sub-tree lengths.A power law function combined with an exponential function captures the link between positions and layers.On the basis of the previous findings,a synergetic syntactic model based on dependency relations is built,which incorporates 4 order parameters,10 syntactic variables and 13 interrelations among them.It's a valuable addition to synergetic syntactic studies.