Abstract
Previous research has tracked the history of the theme-recipient alternation (or: “dative” alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis in a probabilistic variationist framework. Against this backdrop, we explore the language-internal and language-external factors that probabilistically influence the alternation between theme-first and recipient-first ordering in a large diachronic corpus of Chinese writing (1300s–1900s). Our analysis reveals that the recipient-first variant is consistently more frequent than its competitor and even more common in more recent texts than in older texts. Regression analysis also suggests that there are stable linguistic constraints (i.e., animacy and definiteness of theme) and fluid constraints (i.e., end-weight, recipient animacy). Notably, the diachronic instability of end-weight and animacy points to cross-linguistic parallels for ditransitive constructions, including the English dative alternation. We thus contribute to theory building in variationist linguistics by advancing the field’s knowledge about the comparative fluidity versus stability of probabilistic constraints.
Funding source: Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: 171088
Funding source: China Scholarship Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: CSC201906900122
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Xiaoyu Tian for her help in the annotation process, Matt Hunt Gardner for his insightful comments on an early version of this paper, and two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive feedback and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Research funding: Work on this paper was supported by a China Scholarship Council grant to the first author (grant no. CSC201906900122) and a Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation grant to the third author (grant no. 171088).
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2021-0048). The dataset and R scripts are available at https://osf.io/u7m5p/.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Transitivity on a continuum: the transitivity index as a predictor of Spanish causatives
- Modelling incipient probabilistic grammar change in real time: the grammaticalisation of possessive pronouns in European Spanish locative adverbial constructions
- The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries
- Inferring case paradigms in Koalib with computational classifiers
- The distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/ in Scottish Standard English
- Towards a dynamic behavioral profile of the Mandarin Chinese temperature term re: a diachronic semasiological approach
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Transitivity on a continuum: the transitivity index as a predictor of Spanish causatives
- Modelling incipient probabilistic grammar change in real time: the grammaticalisation of possessive pronouns in European Spanish locative adverbial constructions
- The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries
- Inferring case paradigms in Koalib with computational classifiers
- The distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/ in Scottish Standard English
- Towards a dynamic behavioral profile of the Mandarin Chinese temperature term re: a diachronic semasiological approach