Topic marking in a Shanghainese corpus: From observation to prediction

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Arppe, Antti
  • Newman, John
  • Han, Weifang

• Shanghainese is an extremely topic-prominent language with many topic markers in competition with one another, often without any obvious basis for the selection of one topic marker over another. We explore the influence of five variables on the five most frequent topic markers in a corpus of (spoken) Shanghainese: topic length, syntactic category of the topic, function of the topic, comment type, and genre. We carry out a multivariate statistical analysis of the data, relying on a polytomous logistic regression model. Our approach leads to a satisfying quantification of the role of each factor, as well as an estimate of the probabilities of combinations of factors, in influencing the choice of topic marker. This study serves simultaneously as an introduction to the polytomous package (Arppe 2013) in the statistical software package R.

• Date created

  2013

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Polytomous logistic regression
  • Statistical analysis
  • Chinese dialect
  • Shanghainese
  • Topic marking
  • Probabilities

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3FF3M347

• License

  © 2013 Antti Arppe, Weifang Han & John Newman. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.