LFG and the Analysis of Chinese

After a discussion of various aspect of subjecthood in Cantonese the paperproposes that rather than morphological function specification one needs functionalmapping principles as provided in the LFG architecture and pragmatic-discoursecriteria to specify subject functions in Chinese and thus salvage the subject conditionin this language.In a paper titled An Optimality-Theoretic Account of Mandarin ComplexReflexive ‘ta ziji’ (s/he-self) Pan Haihua and Hu Jianhua of the City University ofHong Kong take up the issue of long distance binding in Mandarin, as shown in (2):(2) Johni shuo naben shu hai-le ta-zijii say that book hurt-PERF he-self‘Jogn said that that book hurt himself’Their proposal lies in the exploitation of the relatively new notion of hard and softconstaints to set up a ranking that can account for the facts of complex reflexivebinding in Mandarin.Sun Maosong of Tsinghua University, Beijing in his article LFG for Chinese:Issues of Representation and Computation assesses the power of the LFG formalismwith respect of Chinese computing. According to him, LFG is quite powerful indescribing linguistic constructions of Chinese which are of relative sophistication asshown in the Mandarin sentence (3):(3) Zhang-san fang4 gou3 yao3 si3 le Li-siperson1 send dog bite die AUX person2N1 V1 N2 V2 V3 AUX N3‘Zhang-san sent the dog to bite Li-si, and Li-si died.’In the author’s opinion however, LFG, as a computational formalism, is still notstrong enough for computing Chinese. This evaluation of the LFG formalism should