Abstract

harry simon ON SPEECH CHARACTERISTICS IN CHINESE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MODELS OF SPEECH INTRODUCTION This paper examines a number of possible approaches to the construction of experimental models of speech in a written form.(l) It has its origin in a long standing interest (2) in those features of sentence structure which are triggered by the discourse or text environment in which the sentence occurs, rather than by the sentence scenavio (3) to (1) I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Australian Research Grants Committee for its support over a number of years for work on models of speech of which this paper covers only one aspect. I should also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to colleagues, who have made valuable suggestions on a number of earlier versions of this paper delivered in Melbourne, Brisbane, Hong Kong and Paris, notably S<#ren Egerod, Alexis Rygaloff, Benjamin T*sou, D.C. Lau, Cyril Birch, .. Chang, Christine Liao, Jerome Hu, Viviane Alleton and Samuel Cheung. (2) Cf. Simon (73), (78a) and (78b) and Kratochvil (68), pp. 133-134. (3) For a definition of the way in which the term soenavio is to be understood see section 2, pp. 11-14. Cah. de