Corpora: Q: what behind Part-of-speech?

Ji Donghong (dhji@krdl.org.sg)
Fri, 24 Apr 1998 17:10:48 +0800 (SST)

In Chinese, there are fewer affixes for us to classfy words into
categories, e.g., nouns, verbs or adjectives, etc., so even up to now,
there has been no information about POS for Chinese words in the most
famous Chinese dictionary, i.e., Mordern Chinese Dictionary. Some
linguists proposed that Chiense words be classified as nouns, verbs,
adjectives, etc. completely based on their grammartical distribution,
which they refered to as their ability to combine with other words.
My questions are:

1) Can such grammartical distribution be solely used as a means to
determine POS of words?

2) Are there any similar problems in other languages? and how to solve
the problem there?

Any comments or information would be greatly appreciated. I will summarize
if there is enough interest.

Ji Donghong
Kent Ridge Digital Labs
Email: dhji@krdl.org.sg