Is Argument Structure of Learner Chinese Understandable: A Corpus-Based
  Analysis
Yuguang Duan Zi Lin Weiwei Sun
This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of argument structure errors in
learner Chinese. The data for analysis includes sentences produced by language
learners as well as their corrections by native speakers. We couple the data
with semantic role labeling annotations that are manually created by two senior
students whose majors are both Applied Linguistics. The annotation procedure is
guided by the Chinese PropBank specification, which is originally developed to
cover first language phenomena. Nevertheless, we find that it is quite
comprehensive for handling second language phenomena. The inter-annotator
agreement is rather high, suggesting the understandability of learner texts to
native speakers. Based on our annotations, we present a preliminary analysis of
competence errors related to argument structure. In particular, speech errors
related to word order, word selection, lack of proposition, and
argument-adjunct confounding are discussed.