On May 12, 2024, “Multivariate Probabilistic Grammar Research Forum” was successfully held on Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University. Hosted by the School of International Studies and organized by the Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics and the Literary Computing Team at Zhejiang University, this forum attracted nearly 80 students and teachers from Beijing Foreign Studies University, Shanghai International Studies University, Sichuan International Studies University, Renmin University of China, Zhejiang University, and several other universities in Hangzhou. The forum was structured into two sessions: keynote speeches by experts followed by presentations by young scholars.
At the opening ceremony, Professor SHAO Bin from the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University delivered the opening remarks. He introduced the inspiration behind the forum’s theme, emphasizing the importance of multivariate analysis methods and probabilistic approaches in linguistics. He hoped that the attendees would focus on probabilistic grammar and the study of language ontology.
Insightful ideas abounded the keynote presentation session. Professor XU Jiajin from Beijing Foreign Studies University delivered a keynote speech titled “A Study on Large Language Models (LLM) and Contextual Co-selection”. He demonstrated the powerful generative capabilities of LLM and expounded on the theoretical construct of contextual co-selection. Professor XU, along with his doctoral student LI Weijing and postdoctoral researcher HUANG Ding, presented three case studies to demonstrate the advantages of LLM in data annotation. They analyzed the extended meaning units of “Naked Eye”, the interactional subjectivity in the spoken language of learners, and the contradictions and conflicts in English picture books. Through these case studies, they explored the mechanisms of contextual co-selection underlying linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena.
Professor LEI Lei from Shanghai International Studies University presented a lecture titled “A Study on the Assessment and Application of Readability in Chinese”. She introduced the current state of research on readability, an important linguistic feature of text, and a new tool called AlphaReadabilityChinese, developed by her team to measure the readability of Chinese texts across three dimensions: lexical, syntactic, and semantic, along with nine language metrics. Professor LEI demonstrated the applicability of the tool with three cases studies on the identification of difficulty levels of Chinese textbooks, textual differences between sci-tech journals and social science journals, and readability differences of novels by Louis Cha (Jin Yong) and Gu Long.
Professor WU Shuqiong from Sichuan International Studies University delivered a lecture titled “Antonym Order in English and Chinese Coordinate Structures: A Multifactorial Analysis”. Professor WU first introduced the quantitative turn in cognitive linguistics and explained the possibility and rationality of integrating it with corpus linguistics research. She then introduced the corpus-based behavioral profiling analysis from various aspects, including conceptualization, theoretical foundation, operational steps, and applications. Finally, Professor WU provided a detailed introduction to her multifactorial analysis study on the co-occurrence order of antonyms in English and Chinese coordinate structures.
Professor YAO Xinle from Renmin University of China delivered a keynote speech titled “A Multivariable Analysis of English Tense and Aspect”. Based on a diachronic corpus, Professor YAO shared her findings from a multivariable analysis of tense-aspect in American English, revealing the patterns of contextual variation in tense marking. Through a comparison of American English and Argentine Spanish, Professor YAO found multiple similarities in the grammaticalization of tense-aspect markers between the two languages. She emphasized that by integrating theories and empirical findings from other branches of linguistics, corpus research can provide more realistic and insightful explanations for linguistic phenomena.
At the young scholars’ session, Dr. WANG Zhichao from Renmin University of China presented a lecture titled “A Multifactorial Analysis of the Alternation between the French Adverbs très and bien”. Based on a French text corpus, he elaborated the influence of factors such as discourse markers, syntactic position, adjective-adverb polarity, verb tense, and subject person on the choice of the two adverbs. His study revealed subtle differences in the usage of French adverbs and the practical utility of multifactorial analysis methods.
Dr. CAI Yingying, a postdoctoral researcher from the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University, presented a lecture titled “A Multifactorial Analysis of the Alternation between Prepositional Complements of Psychological Adjectives in English”. Utilizing comprehensive data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), she revealed that the choice of prepositions in the construction “angry + prepositional complement” is under the joint impact of semantic, syntactic, and register features. Through the application of random forest and conditional inference tree models, her research provided a more detailed perspective for understanding this linguistic phenomenon.
Dr. ZHANG Yi from Foreign Language and Literature at Zhejiang University presented a lecture titled “Probabilistic Grammar from the Perspective of Language Contact: A Case Study of the English It-Cleft Construction”. She conducted an in-depth exploration of the interface between language contact and morphosyntactic variation. Dr. ZHANG demonstrated the heterogeneity within different World Englishes varieties and emphasized the negative correlation between the intensity of language contact and the degree of morphosyntactic variation in English, providing a strong empirical analysis for understanding the mechanisms of probabilistic grammar under the influence of language contact. Dr. ZHANG investigated the interplay among syntactic configurations, semantic integration, and sociolinguistic factors, offering novel insights into the syntactic understanding of the it-cleft construction.
The forum facilitated the sharing of ideas of academic achievements in multivariate analysis probabilistic grammar research. It provided the attendees with cutting-edge linguistic studies from the perspective of multivariable analysis, and explored the applications of LLM in multivariable analysis and probabilistic language research. In the concluding remarks by Professor SHAO Bin, the forum came to a successful conclusion. The attendees expressed that this compact yet substantive forum was highly fruitful. It will undoubtedly contribute to the discipline of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics at the School.
Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Zhejiang University
Literary Computing Team
Photos: YAN Junhao, WU Xinying
Texts: LIN Shuqi, WU Xinying, CAI Yingying
Reviewed by SHAO Bin
Translated by SUN Fangrui, Proofread by XU Xueying
