ABSTRACT
Since grammatical studies in the European sense were introduced into Chinese linguistics in the 18th century, a large number of comparative studies have been done between Chinese and Indo-European languages and extensive discussions have been undertaken to discover the defining feature of Chinese grammar. Gabelentz (1840–1893), for example, already recognised a prominent feature in his Chinesische Grammatik (1881), that it, words have no morphological change in sentences and grammatical relations are mainly expressed by means of word order and function words (Yao, 1999, pp. 6–9). This feature has been referred to as parataxis by Chinese native linguists. In this chapter, a lexicon-construction interactive model is proposed on the basis of large-scale annotated corpora to probe into the paratactic feature of Chinese grammar.
