IS MODERN CHINESE REALLY A SOV LANGUAGE ?
Abstract
IS MODERN CHINESE REALLY SOV LANGUAGE ? ,(#) Modern Chinese (MC) exhibits in surface structure both SVO and SOV patterns. In a sentence of the latter type, the object is generally represented as the prepositional object of , which invariably precedes the main verb. Since the -cons truc t ion is known to have been a rather recent innovation in the history of , mainly as the result of a deverbalization process by which the verb ba heading a verbal series in a sentence had gradually lost its lexical content and practically become a preposition, this fact has been interpreted by some scholars in recent years as evidence of a tendency of word order change from verb-medial to verb-final in Chinese syntax. For an elaboration of this position and arguments in its support, the reader is referred to Li and Thompson 1974a, 1974b. From this perspective MC is pictured as standing near the end of a long evolution involving reorganization of sentential elements that had begun more than two millennia ago. In Li and Thompson 1975, 1976, the authors observe that both VO and OV characteristics are present in MC, and they depict the language as caught in