{"title":"Modeling the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Mengmin Xu, F. Li, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi","doi":"10.1075/ijcl.22072.xu","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n The current study investigates the probabilistic conditioning of the Mandarin locative alternation. We adopt a\n corpus-based multivariate approach to analyze 2,836 observations of locative variants from a large Chinese corpus and annotated\n manually for various language-internal and language-external constraints. Multivariate modeling reveals that the Mandarin locative\n alternation is not only influenced by semantic predictors like affectedness and telicity, but also by previously unexplored\n syntactic and language-external constraints, such as complexity and animacy of locatum and location, accessibility of locatum,\n pronominality, definiteness of location, length ratio and register. Notably, the effects of affectedness, definiteness and\n pronominality are broadly parallel in both the Mandarin locative alternation and its English counterpart. We thus contribute to\n theorizing in corpus-based variationist linguistics by uncovering the probabilistic grammar of the locative alternation in\n Mandarin Chinese, and by identifying the constraints that may be universal across languages.","PeriodicalId":1,"journal":{"name":"Accounts of Chemical Research","volume":"15 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":16.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Accounts of Chemical Research","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22072.xu","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"CHEMISTRY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The current study investigates the probabilistic conditioning of the Mandarin locative alternation. We adopt a
corpus-based multivariate approach to analyze 2,836 observations of locative variants from a large Chinese corpus and annotated
manually for various language-internal and language-external constraints. Multivariate modeling reveals that the Mandarin locative
alternation is not only influenced by semantic predictors like affectedness and telicity, but also by previously unexplored
syntactic and language-external constraints, such as complexity and animacy of locatum and location, accessibility of locatum,
pronominality, definiteness of location, length ratio and register. Notably, the effects of affectedness, definiteness and
pronominality are broadly parallel in both the Mandarin locative alternation and its English counterpart. We thus contribute to
theorizing in corpus-based variationist linguistics by uncovering the probabilistic grammar of the locative alternation in
Mandarin Chinese, and by identifying the constraints that may be universal across languages.
期刊介绍:
Accounts of Chemical Research presents short, concise and critical articles offering easy-to-read overviews of basic research and applications in all areas of chemistry and biochemistry. These short reviews focus on research from the author’s own laboratory and are designed to teach the reader about a research project. In addition, Accounts of Chemical Research publishes commentaries that give an informed opinion on a current research problem. Special Issues online are devoted to a single topic of unusual activity and significance.
Accounts of Chemical Research replaces the traditional article abstract with an article "Conspectus." These entries synopsize the research affording the reader a closer look at the content and significance of an article. Through this provision of a more detailed description of the article contents, the Conspectus enhances the article's discoverability by search engines and the exposure for the research.