Modeling the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese

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.