Study on the English corresponding unit of Chinese clause

Abstract

This paper annotates the English corresponding units of Chinese clauses in Chinese-English translation and statistically analyzes them. Firstly, based on Chinese clause segmentation, we segment English target text into corresponding units (clause) to get a Chinese-to-English clause-aligned parallel corpus. Then, we annotate the grammatical properties of the English corresponding clauses in the corpus. Finally, we find the distribution characteristics of grammatical properties of English corresponding clauses by statistically analyzing the annotated corpus: There are more clauses (1631,74.41%) than sentences (561,25.59%); there are more major clauses (1719,78.42%) than subordinate clauses (473,21.58%); there are more adverbial clauses (392,82.88%) than attributive clauses (81,17.12%) and more non-defining clauses (358,75.69%) than restrictive relative clauses (115,24.31%) in subordinate clauses; and there are more simple clauses (1142,52.1%) than coordinate clauses (1050,47.9%). © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.