Abstract The principle of syntax-semantics correspondence,or the principle of compositionality,is one of the golden rules in the formal treatment of natural language,which is thoroughly embodied in CCG .The common practice of CCG is as follows :in the lexicon of CCG,the basic expressions of NL (natural language) are labeled with an ordered pair of terms,the term of syntactic category and the semantic term .In the process of CCG's derivation,the concatenation of NL expressions has been changed into the parallelism of derivation of syntactic category and l-calculus .In NL processing,the treatment of CCG constitutes a transparent interface between syntax and semantics of NL,because from the formal semantic point of view,the derivation of syntactic category which represents the syntactic construction of NL and the l-calculus which represents the semantic generation of NL by means of providing the indirect model-theoretic interpretations are two sides of the same coin .However,the problem of the CCG approach to Mandarin Chinese under this principle mainly lies in the fact that great progress has been achieved in the treatment of syntax while little progress in the treatment of semantics .Currently,in the CCG's studies on Mandarin Chinese,the researchers mainly explore the possibility of more effective and accurate syntactic parsing by means of giving proper syntactic rules and determining categorial assignment for the basic expressions according to their syntactic features .In contrast,whether such syntactic parsing is suitable for semantic representation is not their concern . Considering the close relation between syntax and semantics,the separation of syntactic parsing from semantic representation will decrease remarkably the significance of the syntactic parsing . For instance,the Mandarin Chinese sentence with prepositional phrases is noted for its flexible word order,which constitutes one of the challenges for CCG .As a tentative solution,Hoffman's multiset-CCG is introduced,which adheres to the lexicalism and aims at representing the flexible word order in Turkish . The multiset-CCG is featured by the flexible order of application of arguments' category,that is,when the functor category is applied to the category of arguments,there is no strict restriction on the order of arguments . The flexible order of arguments' category will render multiset-CCG an advantage in representing the flexible word order in Mandarin Chinese .However,the application of multiset-CCG in the treatment of Mandarin Chinese needs the simplified semantic representation in order to achieve the syntax-semantics correspondence . Since the semantic terms written in the style of MG or Event semantics are not easy to be adapted to the multiset-CCG treatment,it is preferable to adopt the basic concepts of Situation Semantics to simplify the semantic representation :a verb will be viewed as the predicate which signifies the relation existing not only between the argument of Agent and of Patient,but also among the arguments of Instrument,and Place and many others .Depending on a Chinese verb's syntactic functions,it will be possible to label it with more than one syntactic categories and simplified semantic terms . In this way,the syntax-semantics correspondence can be realized in the application of multiset-CCG in parsing Mandarin Chinese sentences with flexible word order .
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