Clausal Complementation in Nepal Bhasa

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Clausal Complementation in Nepal Bhasa

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Zhang, Borui

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2021-11

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Abstract

This dissertation examines the syntax and lexical semantics of finite verbal de- pendent clauses in Nepal Bhasa through fieldwork and by creating a shallow parsing model and corpus-based search to test descriptive generalizations. Nepal Bhasa deploys two main different syntactic complementation strategies: head-final pre-verbal CPs, which I argue are true complements and head-initial post-verbal CPs, which I argue are parataxis. Complementation additionally introduces certain syntactic and morpho- logical constraints. Inchoative and perfective morphemes appear in free alternation in some mono-clausal environments, whereas in embedding structures, an embedding predicate with the inchoative suffix is restricted. By annotating a small dataset from open-source Nepal Bhasa data, I train a chunking model by adopting the technique of transfer learning in machine learning, with fine-tuning the pre-trained mBERT lan- guage model. The preliminary test results show the potential usefulness of using NLP tools to effectively build a corpus for research in low-resource languages. In particular, this method corroborates my descriptive generalization that inchoative is restricted on embedding predicates in Nepal Bhasa. Additional search over the structural treebank corpora of typologically related languages adds evidence to a cross-linguistic generaliza- tion on embedding verb restrictions.

Keywords

complementation

corpora

fieldwork

machine learning

natural language processing

Nepal Bhasa

Description

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. November 2021. Major: Linguistics. Advisor: Claire Halpert. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 105 pages.

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Zhang, Borui. (2021). Clausal Complementation in Nepal Bhasa. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225891.

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