The universality of simple distributional methods: Identifying syntactic categories in Mandarin Chinese

The problem of acquiring language is a difficult and complex one. The traditional assumption is that infants acquire language by virtue of innate knowledge, which reduces the problem to one of tuning this innate knowledge of language in general, to the specific characteristics of the language spoken in the infant’s early environment (e.g. Chomsky, 1980). Nevertheless, without empirical assessment of potential learning mechanisms and sources of information, it may be premature to decide which aspects of language, if any, require drawing on innate knowledge. This paper considers a simple distributional learning mechanism, which does not draw on explicit prior knowledge. This method has previously been shown to be informative about the syntactic category membership of individual words in English, French, and German. We ask whether it can provide similar constraints in Chinese.