The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Research Seminar given by, Haiyong Liu (Professor, CMLLC) on the topic of, "How do the Chinese Say Yes or No?".

Abstract: By design, question and answer is a fundamental communication mode for language. There is an abundant literature on how questions are asked, but little can be found on how they are answered. I believe the latter is as rule-governed as the former. I will study, for example, what makes Chinese, Latin, Thai, and Welsh the so-called verb-echo languages, in that they do not have the plausibly pivotal equivalents of the English yes or no; instead, they use various forms of the verb to express conformation or negation (e.g. ‘Ate’ for yes and ‘Not ate’ for no in Chinese to answer Did you eat?). Do the verb systems of these languages share anything in common? Can they be further divided into sub-groups? Are the ways these languages form questions equally unique? I will also explore if and how AI, with the algorithms generated from big data, can capture the nuances in verb-echoing, when responses can be kaleidoscopic and systematic linguistic research in this area is still scarce. A preliminary dry run on ChatGPT does not seem to have yielded patterns resembling natural speech. This interdisciplinary project probes question answering from the perspectives of syntax, pragmatics, prompt engineering, and sociolinguistics. It will broaden the diversity of linguistic representation and deepen our conception of human cognition in general.