Professor Shi Dingxu from Hong Kong   Polytechnic     University   was invited to deliver a lecture entitled ““Syntactic Research Based on Large-scale Corpus” at the      National      Key      Research      Center   for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (CLAL) on the evening of Novemeber 21, 2015. The lecture was hosted by Professor Zhang Qingwen and attended by faculties and graduate students from the Center.    

Professor Shi first gave an overview of the significant role of corpus. Corpus is the origin and empirical foundation of grammar research, while data collection and application is subject to various theoretical frameworks. The traditional grammar research, following structuralism, mostly studies the real data, and find out the distributional rules therefrom. The formal syntax focuses on both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, and then make the generalizations that can generate grammatical sentences and exclude all of the ungrammatical sentences. However, not all the sentences that accord with syntactic rules can be used, and semantic, phonological and even the pragmatic factors can influence the acceptability of sentences. Then, he argued that the real data are a continuum from the absolutely ungrammatical to completely grammatical. The data in-between are also of substantial use in syntactic research. The analysis of the large-scale corpus, especially the data in-between, can get us to better know syntactic rules and generalize the internal rules underlying natural languages more accurately Moreover, Professor Shi extended this approach to the analysis of several pairs of synonyms, and illustrated the specific operational process.

The lecturelasted about one hour and a half, and ended with Professor Shi discussing insightful questions from audience members that point to interesting directions for the future research.