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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:2 (2024) ► pp.258–285

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Modeling the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese

A corpus-based study

ORCiD logo with link | China University of PetroleumBeijing
 | Beihang University
 | KU Leuven
Published online: 29 January 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22072.xu
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Locatum/location-as-object variants in the locative alternation
  • 3.Methods and data
    • 3.1The BCC corpus
    • 3.2The dataset
    • 3.3Explanatory factors
    • 3.4Statistical methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequencies and variant rates
    • 4.2About the overall importance of constraints: Conditional random forests (CRF) analysis
    • 4.3About effect directions and effect sizes: Mixed-effects logistic regression analysis
      • 4.3.1Fixed effects
      • 4.3.2Interaction terms
      • 4.3.3Random effects
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Probabilistic effects of individual constraints
    • 5.2Interactions
    • 5.3Cross-linguistic universality
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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