Understanding the Use of Quantifiers in Mandarin

TL;DR

This paper presents a Mandarin corpus focusing on quantifier use, compares it with an English corpus, and discusses implications for generating quantified noun phrases, highlighting cross-linguistic differences in expression brevity and informativeness.

Contribution

Introduces MQTUNA, a Mandarin corpus of quantified expressions, and compares it with an English corpus to explore language-specific quantifier usage patterns.

Findings

Some aspects of quantifier use support the 'coolness' hypothesis.

Mandarin speakers tend to be more brief but less informative.

Cross-linguistic differences influence quantified noun phrase generation.

Abstract

We introduce a corpus of short texts in Mandarin, in which quantified expressions figure prominently. We illustrate the significance of the corpus by examining the hypothesis (known as Huang's "coolness" hypothesis) that speakers of East Asian Languages tend to speak more briefly but less informatively than, for example, speakers of West-European languages. The corpus results from an elicitation experiment in which participants were asked to describe abstract visual scenes. We compare the resulting corpus, called MQTUNA, with an English corpus that was collected using the same experimental paradigm. The comparison reveals that some, though not all, aspects of quantifier use support the above-mentioned hypothesis. Implications of these findings for the generation of quantified noun phrases are discussed.