Corpus-based grammar in contrast: the cross-linguistic distributional analysis of Nepali grammatical categories

这项研究涉及一套新的方法来研究尼泊尔语中的名词和动词的语法。在语法中，某些类型的词与特定类别的语法标记相关联。例如，与名词相关的语法类别包括格的标记-在英语中，这些标记大多是介词，例如在短语中，如“在洗澡”，“在星期六”，“用锤子”。相比之下，动词与表示时间（时态）或事件（语气）的可能性/可能性的语法元素相关-这些类别的例子在英语中包括助动词，如'can'，'may'和'shall'，或形式，如'have [done]'或'be [doing]'。在尼泊尔语中，名词和动词之后都可以找到复杂的语法类别序列。例如：（1）名词的例子：'manisharulai'manis-haru-laiman-PLRL-ACC/DAT '（to the）men'（2）另一个例子名词：'kalamle'kalam-lepen-ERG/EARR 'with（a/the）pen'（3）动词的例子：'garirahancha'gar-i-rahan-chado-PASS-stay-be.3SG's/he is doing '（注意：在上面的例子中，语法类别用通常用于它们的术语的大写字母缩写来标记。这些范畴的性质以及它们所出现的结构的性质是本建议的主题，语法范畴的分析通常是通过观察它们的分布来进行的，也就是说，根据它们可以和不可以出现在什么样的语境中。例如，在英语中，名词的一个重要特征是它们可以与单词“the”共同出现，这是一个非常基本的例子。分布在语料库语言学中也很重要--语料库语言学是一种基于在计算机上分析大量文本的语言研究方法。在语料库语言学中，分布可以通过统计学来分析-也就是说，通过观察哪些单词和哪些形式通常一起出现或彼此接近。这种在大量文本中频繁出现的词之间的联系被称为“搭配”。在语法研究中使用语料库方法的好处是，语料库的发现反映了文本中的语法，因为它在日常写作中使用（在某些情况下，也包括语音）。它使我们的语法知识从人们实际使用语言的方式的广泛视角中浮现出来。本研究将开发基于共现和搭配的统计措施的方法，并使用它们来研究尼泊尔语中语法类别的分布。这将使调查的性质，这些语法类别和模式，他们在语言中使用。这将扩展我们对上述例子中尼泊尔语元素类型的了解。长期以来，人们一直认为，语法的某些特征是特定语言所特有的，而其他特征则更普遍，在许多不同的语言中都可以找到。这里建议的调查的最后阶段将是从上面概述的定量方法的角度来研究尼泊尔语和其他语言之间的对比。为此，将对英语和俄语这两种语言的语料库采用同一套方法，这两种语言与尼泊尔语同属一个语系，尽管它们来自世界不同地区。这将允许细粒度的，密切关注的对比分析。在这三种语言中发现的模式将被比较，使我们能够建立一个图片，这些语言的语法如何在真实的文本中不同地使用语法。在所有情况下，分析的原材料将是语料库的计算机搜索的输出。然而，必须仔细分析这些统计信息，以确定计算机检测到的统计联系的意义或语法方面存在哪些感兴趣的模式。

The proposed research concerns the application of a new set of methods to the study of the grammar of nouns and verbs in the Nepali language.In grammar, certain types of word are associated with particular categories of grammatical markers. The grammatical categories associated with nouns, for example, include markers of case - in English these are mostly prepositions, e.g. in phrases such as 'in the bath', 'on Saturday', 'with a hammer'. Verbs, by contrast, are associated with grammatical elements indicating time (tense) or the probability/possibility of an event (mood) - examples of these categories in English include auxiliary verbs such as 'can', 'may', and 'shall', or forms such as 'have [done]' or 'be [doing]'.In Nepali, complex sequences of grammatical categories may found after both nouns and verbs. For example:(1) Example of a noun: 'manisharulai'manis-haru-laiman-PLRL-ACC/DAT'(to the) men'(2) Another example noun: 'kalamle'kalam-lepen-ERG/INSTR'with (a/the) pen'(3) Example of a verb: 'garirahancha'gar-i-rahan-chado-PASS-stay-be.3SG's/he is doing'(NB: in the examples above, the grammatical categories are labelled with abbreviations in capital letters of the terms usually used for them.)The nature of these categories, and the nature of the structures which they occur in, are the topics of this proposal.Grammatical categories have often been analysed by looking at their distribution: that is, in terms of what contexts they can and cannot occur in. For instance, in English, an important feature of nouns is that they may co-occur with the word 'the', to give one very basic example. Distribution is also important in corpus linguistics - the approach to studying language based on analysing large collections of text on computer. In corpus linguistics, distribution can be analysed statistically - that is, by looking at what words and what forms commonly occur together or in close proximity to one another. This link between words which occur frequently together in a large corpus of text is described as 'collocation'.The advantage of using corpus methods in the study of grammar is that findings from a corpus reflect grammar in texts, as it is used in everyday writing (and, in some cases, speech as well). It allows our knowledge of grammar to emerge from a wide view of the ways in which people actually use their language.This study will develop methods based on statistical measures of co-occurrence and collocation, and use them to look at the distribution of grammatical categories in Nepali. This will enable an investigation of the nature of these grammatical categories and the patterns in which they are used in language. This will extend our knowledge of the types of elements in the Nepali language seen in the examples above.It has long been established that some features of grammar are specific to particular languages, whereas others are more general and are found in many different languages. The final stage of the investigation proposed here will be to look at the contrast between Nepali and other languages, from the perspective of the quantitative methods outlined above. To do this, the same set of methods will be applied to corpora of two language - English and Russian - which are from the same family of languages as Nepali, although they come from different regions of the world. This will allow a finely-grained, closely focussed contrastive analysis. The patterns found in the three languages will be compared, allowing us to build up a picture of how the grammars of these languages use grammar differently in real texts.In all cases, the raw material for analysis will be the output of computerised searches of a corpus. However, this statistical information must be carefully analysed to establish what patterns can of interest can be shown to exist, in terms of the meaning or the grammar of the statistical links that the computer detects.