NP weight effects in word order variation in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Background: In the literature of sentence production, both short-before-long and long-before-short word order tendencies have been observed across languages. Specifically, SVO languages such as English show the short-before-long noun phrase (NP) shift, placing heavy NPs near the end of the sentence; on the other hand, verb-final languages such as Japanese and Korean show the long-before-short NP shift, placing heavy NPs earlier in the sentence. In this paper, we examine the effects of NP weight on word order variation in Mandarin Chinese, which not only has a predominantly SVO word order but also allows a grammaticalized SOV construction (i.e., the ba construction). Methods: We conducted a corpus analysis with two verb-specific datasets extracted from the 10 million-word Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (Version 5.0; Chen et. al., Proceeding of the 11th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 1996). Each dataset contained more than 900 sentences, in either SVO or ba construction and possible to be converted to the other word order without changing sentence meaning. Generalized mixed-effects models were built to examine the effect of NP weight on the surface word order (SVO vs. ba), while controlling for other factors that are also known to influence the SVO-ba alternation (e.g., verb complement, animacy, and givenness of the object NP, sentence structure, and structural parallelism in the context). The accuracy of the modeling results was inspected by comparing the word order predictions made by the models with both actual word orders observed in the corpus and naturalness ratings of alternative word orders by native speakers in behavioral experiments. Results: Our results show a U-shaped NP weight effect on SVO-ba alternation, in that both very short and very long NPs are more likely to be shifted to preverbal positions than NPs with medium weight. These results provide evidence that both conceptual and positional factors are operating in the preverbal domain in Mandarin. Conclusion:Taken together with previous findings of positional factors operating in the postverbal domain in Mandarin, our results suggest that the relative sensitivity to conceptual and positional factors can vary within a language. We discuss findings in the framework of the sentence production model.