some corpus-based observation of Mandarin alphabetical words

1. Agenda
Introduction
Research Questions
Selection of MAWs
Data and method
Results
Discussion
Conclusion

2. Introduction
 Mandarin Alphabetical Words (MAWs) mainly refer to code-mixing
words in Chinese which usually consist of Chinese Characters and
alphabetical letters (e.g., BB霜 ‘BB cream’, 打CALL ‘raving’).
 The most frequent and productive pattern: A-C (alphabetic letter +
character) e.g., “type B” in the form of B型
 Complicated linguistic idiosyncrasies and linguistic position of MAWs
and their disconnection with one important Mandarin Chinese
characteristic: Chinese classifier(CL) feature
 Methods: Corpus-based approach will be applied in this study with
data extractions from BLCU Chinese Corpus (BCC) and Chinese Web
2017 Simplified corpus (zhTenTen)

3. Research questions:
1) Whether the CL distribution of MAWs follows the semantic
motivated rule as mandarin noun phrases do (e.g., 一台POS机 / 一
台刷卡机, ‘a POS machine’)?
2) Are there slight differences of the CL collocations in relation to
MAWs in different scenarios?

4. Selection of MAWs
Based on two main resources(wordlists):
Sinica & Gigaword Corpus (Huang and Liu, 2017) with over 1,157 MAWs
Sina Weibo (Xiang et al. 2020) consists of 16,207 MAWs
Selection criteria:
• POS: nouns or noun compounds
• AC (alphabetic letters + characters) type
• have commonly used pure Mandarin equivalent expressions
• both the MAWs and their Mandarin equivalent can co-occur with at least
three CLs
• both the MAWs and their Mandarin equivalent have over 100 hits in both
corpora

5. Selection of MAWs

6. Selection of MAWs

7. Selection of MAWs

8. Selection of MAWs
Valid data types of CL-noun compound
Huang and Ahrens (2016)

9. Valid data types of CL-noun compound
1. CLs with a numeral preceding the noun.
想 买 这样 一 个 U盘。
BCC corpus
2. CLs be used with a referential demonstrative without a numeral.
这 个 U盘 你 敢 用 吗？
BCC corpus
3. CLs with ordinal numbers preceding the noun.
2000年 第一 个 U盘 容量 仅有 8 MB。
zhTenTen corpus
4. The numeral-CL combinations are placed after the noun.
大陆 地区 共 有 GRE考试 29 场。
zhTenTen Corpus
Selection of MAWs

10. Selection of MAWs
Valid data types of CL-noun compound
5. CLs and the nouns are separated by other chunks.
一 个 可 循环 使用 的 绿色 U盘。
BCC corpus
6. CLs and the nouns are separated in two clauses.
柜台 上 都 摆放 着 POS机，有的 还 不止 一个。
zhTenTen corpus
7. The CLs are be reduplicated.
演绎 出 一 幕 幕 精彩 的 时装秀。
BCC corpus
8. The numeral 一 ‘one’ before the CLs are omitted.
刚 军训 完， 想 买 只 BB霜。
zhTenTen corpus

11. Data and method
Corpora:
BLCU Chinese Corpus(BCC): 15 billion words
Chinese Web 2017 (zhTenTen17) Simplified: 16.5 billion words
Advantages: large size, diversity in genre and style, adequate
functions and linguistic annotations.
BCC corpus: formal language style
zhTenTen: more balanced data

12. Data and method
The process of extracting data

13. Result Fig. 3. CL-distributions of MAWs with Mandarin equivalents.

14. Result

15. Result

16. Discussion
5 categories: clothes, people, machines, cards, and stocks

17. Discussion
> The MAWs and the pure Chinese words behave similarly in
terms of CL selection in most cases. Both MAWs and Chinese words
can select a group of CLs to emphasis different semantic facets in real
context. CLs selected by each category are semantically motivated.
> MAWs seem to co-occur with more types of CLs than Mandarin
words. This reveals a fact that with alphabets adding to Chinese
characters, the MAWs tend to be more productive and dynamic in semantics
compared to registered pure Mandarin words.
> When expressing the “kind” meaning of a product, the pure
Mandarin words are more likely to be chosen; while referring to
a specific entity, the MAWs tend to be used. This phenomenon
confirms the essential role of alphabets that are loan into the Chinese
lexicon and at the same time these alphabets minorly affect the semantic
status of the entire word during the lexicon adaption.

18. Conclusion
The corpus-driven analysis reports the classifier distributions of
MAWs in comparison to the pure Mandarin counterparts, focusing
on the major A-C type.
Main findings:
Q1: the classifier distribution of alphabet-character MAWs with
characters as head of nouns basically follows the semantic
motivated rule shared by traditional noun phrases.
Q2: MAWs are more popularly used based on the fact that more
classifiers especially individual classifiers are co-occurring with
them, and also due to the special lexical structure of MAWs with a
richer sub-component composition and a fusion of alphabets in the
lexicon.

19. Thank you!
Any questions?