Beyond dynasties and binary alternations: a diachronic corpus study of four-way variability in Chinese theme-recipient constructions

Abstract Despite the vast body of literature on the historical development of the theme-recipient alternation (also known as the “dative” alternation) in Chinese, most studies that have been conducted so far are limited to philological recounts of the binary choice between the prepositional dative and the ditransitive dative across dynasties, which usually spanned centuries. Against this backdrop, we conduct a state-of-the-art variationist analysis of the four variants, utilizing a large and richly annotated diachronic dataset based on a corpus of Chinese texts (1300s–1900s). Using conditional inference trees and conditional random forest analysis, we demonstrate that end-weight effects are the most stable linguistic constraint on variation, while definiteness and animacy of the theme constituent tend to be more fluid. Supplementary distinctive collexeme analysis reveals a strong collostructional interplay between verbs and the variants, including changes involving the prototypical verb of GIVING 给gĕi.