User:Miaomiao Zhang
My name is Miaomiao Zhang and I come from China. I received my B. A. in German in 2005 and M. A. in German literature in 2008 at Xi'an International Studies University in China. Besides my mother tongue Mandarin Chinese, I can communicate in written and spoken English as well as German, and understand Swedish as well as Norwegian. I have also participated in the Finnish language training at:Aalto University. Because of my love for languages, I decided to dedicate myself to Linguistics. Now I am a master student majoring in linguistics at the department of Language and Communication Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
For my thesis, I worked on serial verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It is well known that Mandarin Chinese, unlike Indo-European languages, has no verb conjugation and no noun declension, yet it has an intriguing system of constructions similar to serial verb constructions where a series of verbs share a common subject. These constructions have been of particular interest to scholars of Mandarin Chinese and Western linguists alike. Building on work from both academic traditions, I have tried to classify Mandarin serial verb constructions with the goal to make them more accessible to linguistic research on the one side, and Natural Language Processing on the other. My supervisors were Assoc. Prof. Dorothee Beermann and Prof. Lars Hellan. As part of my work I created a research corpus of Mandarin serial verb constructions using primary and secondary sources. This corpus is accessible on TypeCraft. Although not part of my thesis work, I have also worked with the Linguistic Knowledge Builder LKBusing Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a work which a hope to continue after my graduation.
In addition, I also hope to do some research on comparative linguistics, and other basic linguistic theories, for example: phonology, morphology, phonetics and pragmatics. Besides, the natural language processing, machine translation and computational linguistics are my current interest, as well.
Contact: miaozhan@gmail.com