Understanding the Use of Quantifiers in Mandarin
This work addresses a linguistic theory for language researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hypotheses and corpora.
The authors tackled the hypothesis that East Asian language speakers use quantifiers more briefly but less informatively by comparing a new Mandarin corpus (MQTUNA) with an English one, finding partial support with some aspects aligning with the hypothesis.
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.