Home Linguistics & Semiotics Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin

  • Yi Li EMAIL logo , Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Weiwei Zhang
Published/Copyright: March 12, 2024
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper aims to quantify distances between varieties of Mandarin (diachronic, regional, and situational) as a function of the similarity in the choice between syntactic variants in the Mandarin theme-recipient alternation (yŭ/gěi dative alternation). We use a novel corpus-based method, Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling, which draws inspiration from work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. Analysis reveals that, while there is a relatively stable probabilistic grammar across the investigated varieties, historical varieties do exhibit a relatively higher degree of heterogeneity than synchronic varieties. Despite the overall high similarity of the latter, we identify substantial probabilistic differences between fictional writings of Modern Mainland Mandarin and all other synchronic varieties. Our findings thus provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the transition from Early Mandarin to Modern Mandarin over the past two centuries has witnessed salient grammatical shifts and also empirically demonstrate the interaction between genre variability and regional variability in Modern Mandarin.

Keywords: VADIS; comparative sociolinguistics; theme-recipient alternation; probabilistic grammar; varieties of Mandarin
Corresponding author: Yi Li, School of Foreign Studies, Tongji University, Siping Road 1239, Shanghai, 200092, China; and Center for Chinese Discourse and Global Communication, Tongji University, Siping Road 1239, Shanghai, 200092, China, E-mail:

Funding source: China Scholarship Council

Award Identifier / Grant number: CSC201906900122

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Professor Jason Grafmiller for his help with the VADIS modeling, Dr. Lei Ye for his help with the Python scripts for data extraction, and two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive feedback and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

  1. Research funding: Work on this paper was supported by a China Scholarship Council grant to the first author (grant no. CSC201906900122).

Supplementary Materials

Detailed descriptions of the corpora and the linguistic constraints, R code, and fuller exemplification of tests and results are available at https://osf.io/u496a/.

References

Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Benjamin M. Bolker & Steven C. Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed effect models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.Search in Google Scholar

Behaghel, Otto. 1909. Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen 25. 110–142.Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4). 711–733. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0186.Search in Google Scholar

Chui, Kawai & Huei-ling Lai. 2008. The NCCU corpus of spoken Chinese: Mandarin, Hakka, and southern Min. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 6(2). 119–144.Search in Google Scholar

De Vaus, David. 2002. Analyzing social science data. London: Sage.Search in Google Scholar

Gelman, Andrew. 2008. Scaling regression inputs by dividing by two standard deviations. Statistics in Medicine 27(15). 2865–2873. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.3107.Search in Google Scholar

Goebl, Hans. 1982. Dialektometrie: Prinzipien und methoden des einsatzes der numerischen taxonomie im bereich der dialektgeographie. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.Search in Google Scholar

Grafmiller, Jason. 2014. Variation in English genitives across modality and genres. English Language & Linguistics 18(3). 471–496. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674314000136.Search in Google Scholar

Grafmiller, Jason & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2018. Mapping out particle placement in Englishes around the world: A study in comparative sociolinguistic analysis. Language Variation & Change 30(3). 385–412. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394518000170.Search in Google Scholar

Guy, Gregory R. 2005. Letters to Language. Language 81(3). 561–563. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0132.Search in Google Scholar

Hashimoto, Mantaro. 1977. The double object construction in Chinese. Monumenta Serica 33(1). 268–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.1977.11745049.Search in Google Scholar

Hashimoto, Mantaro. 1986. The altaicization of northern Chinese. In John McCoy & Timothy Light (eds.), Contributions to Sino-Tibetan studies, 76–97. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004655409_004Search in Google Scholar

Hawkins, John A. 1995. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511554285Search in Google Scholar

Hudson, Richard A. 1996. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Hothorn, Torsten, Kurt Hornik & Achim Zeileis. 2006. Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. Journal of Computational & Graphical Statistics 15(3). 651–674. https://doi.org/10.1198/106186006x133933.Search in Google Scholar

Kruskal, Joseph B. & Myron Wish. 1978. Multidimensional scaling. London: Sage.10.4135/9781412985130Search in Google Scholar

La Peruta, Roberta. 2022. Using VADIS to weigh competing epicentral influence. World Englishes 41. 400–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12585.Search in Google Scholar

Labov, William. 2010. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 3, Cognitive and cultural factors (Language in Society 39). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781444327496Search in Google Scholar

Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.195Search in Google Scholar

Liu, Feng-Hsi. 2006. Dative constructions in Chinese. Language & Linguistics 7(4). 863–904.Search in Google Scholar

Li, Charles & Sandra Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520352858Search in Google Scholar

Liu, Yi-Hsien & Heeju Hwang. 2022. V-gei vs. double object construction: The mental representation of the Mandarin V-gei construction. In Andrew Simpson (ed.), New explorations in Chinese theoretical syntax, 539–553. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.272.19liuSearch in Google Scholar

Li, Yi, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Weiwei Zhang. 2023. The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: Tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries. Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory 19(2). 207–235. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2021-0048.Search in Google Scholar

Liu, Yi, Pascale Fung, Yongsheng Yang, Christopher Cieri, Shudong Huang & David Graff. 2006. HKUST/MTS: A very large scale Mandarin telephone speech corpus. In Qiang Huo, Bin Ma, Eng-Siong Chng & Haizhou Li (eds.), Chinese spoken language processing, 724–735. Berlin: Springer.10.1007/11939993_73Search in Google Scholar

Peng, Chun-Yi. 2020. The placement of co-verb gěi in spoken Mandarin varieties: A study on regional influences. Chinese Language & Discourse 11(2). 335–354. https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.18006.pen.Search in Google Scholar

Peyraube, Alain. 1985. Syntaxe diachronique du chinois: Évolution des constructions datives du XIVe siècle av. J.-C. au XVIIIe siècle. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 14(2). 289–294.10.3406/clao.1985.1176Search in Google Scholar

Poplack, Shana & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 1999. The grammaticization of going to in (African American) English. Language Variation & Change 11(3). 315–342. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394599113048.Search in Google Scholar

R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org/.Search in Google Scholar

Röthlisberger, Melanie. 2021. Between context and community: Regional variation in register effects in the English dative alternation. In Elena Seoane & Douglas Biber (eds.), Corpus-based approaches to register variation, 111–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/scl.103.05rotSearch in Google Scholar

Sun, Xixin (ed.). 2014. 中古近代汉语语法研究述要 [Studies on Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin grammar]. Shanghai: Fudan University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. Grammatical variation in British English dialects: A study in corpus-based dialectometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511763380Search in Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Jason Grafmiller & Laura Rosseel. 2019. Variation-based distance and similarity modeling: A case study in world Englishes. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00023.Search in Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali. 2001. Comparative sociolinguistics. In Jack Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change, 729–763. Malden: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470756591.ch28Search in Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali. 2012. Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar

Tamaredo, Iván, Melanie Röthlisberger, Jason Grafmiller & Benedikt Heller. 2020. Probabilistic indigenization effects at the lexis–syntax interface. English Language & Linguistics 24(2). 413–440. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674319000133.Search in Google Scholar

Tian, Xiaoyu, Weiwei Zhang & Dirk Speelman. 2022. Lectal variation in Chinese analytic causative constructions: What trees can and cannot tell us. In Dennis Tay & Molly Pan (eds.), Data analytics in cognitive linguistics: Methods and insights, 137–168. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110687279-006Search in Google Scholar

Wolk, Christoph, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2013. Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica 30(3). 382–419. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.30.3.04wol.Search in Google Scholar

Yao, Yao & Feng-Hsi Liu. 2010. A working report on statistically modeling dative variation in Mandarin Chinese. In Chu-Ren Huang & Dan Jurafsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics. Beijing: Coling 2010 Organizing Committee. https://aclanthology.org/C10-1.Search in Google Scholar

Zhang, Bojiang. 1999. 现代汉语的双及物结构式 [The ditransitive construction in Modern Chinese]. Zhongguo Yuwen 3. 175–184.Search in Google Scholar

Zhang, Wen. 2015. 影响汉语给予类双及物构式句式选择的制约因素 [The factors determining the alternation of the ditransitive construction]. Yuyan Jiaoxue Yu Yanjiu 2. 54–65.Search in Google Scholar

Zhang, Cong & Haitao Liu. 2019. Chinese evolution in recent 150 years: A diachronic study of word frequency in the Gospel of Mark. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 47(2). 497–530. https://doi.org/10.1353/jcl.2019.0021.Search in Google Scholar

Zhang, Dong & Jiajin Xu. 2019. 英汉与格交替现象的多因素研究 [A multifactorial study of dative alternation in English and Chinese]. Waiguoyu 2. 24–33.10.32629/eep.v2i6.326Search in Google Scholar

Zhang, Weiwei & Fang Wang. 2017. 从基于样例的概念空间看构式交替 – 以“让”和“给”的被动用法为例 [An exemplar-based conceptual space of Chinese passives with rang and gei]. Waiyu yu Waiyu Jiaoxue 6. 22–33.Search in Google Scholar

Zhu, Dexi. 1979. 与动词“给”相关的句法问题 [Syntactic issues related to the verb gei]. Fangyan 2. 81–87.Search in Google Scholar
Received: 2022-11-10
Accepted: 2023-08-10
Published Online: 2024-03-12

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  30. Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
  31. Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
  33. Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
  34. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  35. How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
  36. Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
  37. Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
  38. On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
  39. The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
  40. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  41. A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
  42. Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
  43. “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
  44. Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
  45. Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
  46. Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
  47. What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
  48. From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
  49. Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
  50. Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
  51. Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
  52. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  53. Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin
  54. Finding continuers in Swedish Sign Language
  55. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
  56. Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
  57. Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
  58. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
  59. The Red Hen Audio Tagger
  60. Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
  61. Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
  62. Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
  63. Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
  64. Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
  65. Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
  66. The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
  67. Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
  68. Cognitive Linguistics
  69. Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
  70. Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0134
Keywords for this article
VADIS; comparative sociolinguistics; theme-recipient alternation; probabilistic grammar; varieties of Mandarin

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  30. Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
  31. Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
  33. Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
  34. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  35. How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
  36. Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
  37. Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
  38. On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
  39. The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
  40. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  41. A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
  42. Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
  43. “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
  44. Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
  45. Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
  46. Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
  47. What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
  48. From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
  49. Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
  50. Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
  51. Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
  52. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  53. Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin
  54. Finding continuers in Swedish Sign Language
  55. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
  56. Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
  57. Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
  58. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
  59. The Red Hen Audio Tagger
  60. Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
  61. Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
  62. Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
  63. Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
  64. Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
  65. Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
  66. The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
  67. Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
  68. Cognitive Linguistics
  69. Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
  70. Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 19.12.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0134/html
Scroll to top button