earticle

영어

Many studies (e.g., Ren 2004, Xu 2013, Zhou 2016) noticed the oddity of the SOV order of Northwestern Chinese in the context of Chinese as an SVO language, while much less attention has been given to word order in ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese. This article examines the word order of ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese dialects. In general, different ditransitive constructions belong to or are close to different language patterns (either the Chinese pattern or Altaic/Tibetan pattern). DOC and DDC-I in some SVO dialects represent the Chinese pattern. DatC-I and DDC-II have one additional feature that represents the Altaic/Tibetan pattern; i.e., the R is in front of the V. DDC-III and DatC-II, which exist only in the preferred SOV dialects, are closer to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern because the dative marker is postpositional. DatC-III, appearing in SOV dialects, completely turns to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern since the T also moves in front of the V. After the examination above, two typological features emerge. First, in some dialects, the R and T fall on different sides of the V, which is typologically rare. Second, the R is in front of the V, which is different from the placement in Mandarin Chinese. Both features are induced by language contact with Altaic/Tibetan languages in the same area. During language contact, some constructions in recipient languages change faster than others. For example, Wang and Dede (2016) demonstrated that the negative markers in the Xining, an SVO dialect, have little freedom of movement, and they must appear adjacent to the verb they modify; and the noun of a place of destination is located before the verb in SVO Northwestern Chinese. Both are different from Mandarin Chinese. This reveals that even if the basic word order of some Northwestern Chinese dialects is still SVO, the effect of language contact exists in a somewhat unremarkable manner, leading to gradual changes in word order. Take DatC-I as an example. One may not notice that DatC-I relates to language contact, since Mandarin Chinese seems to have the same kind of construction (i.e., the benefactive construction). However, after close observation, we find that DatC-I is the most common and natural construction for expressing a giving event, whereas the benefactive construction in Mandarin Chinese does not apply only to giving events. Therefore, DatC-I is a true ditransitive construction, whereas its formal counterpart in Mandarin Chinese is not. If these “quiet” changes are noticed, one can better grasp the complete picture of language change.