Startseite The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries
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The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries

  • Yi Li ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Benedikt Szmrecsanyi und Weiwei Zhang
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 6. Dezember 2021

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.


Corresponding author: Yi Li, Department of Linguistics, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 171088

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.

  1. 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/.


Received: 2021-06-30
Accepted: 2021-11-10
Published Online: 2021-12-06
Published in Print: 2023-05-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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