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Part of
The Determinants of Diachronic Stability
Edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Lieven Danckaert and Melissa Farasyn
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 254] 2019
► pp. 101–130

Chapter 5
Disharmony in harmony with diachronic stability

The case of Chinese

 | Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, CNRS-EHESS-INALCO
 | Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, CNRS-EHESS-INALCO
Chinese is an intriguing case of syntactic stability. Since the earliest available documents (13th c. BC) up to today, it has displayed SVO order in combination with a head final NP as well as – in subsequent stages – other phenomena said to be typical of SOV languages, such as postpositions (since 1st c. BC) and a head-final CP (since 5th c. BC). This contradicts the received wisdom in the literature that highly ‘disharmonic’ stages are unstable and liable to change towards a (more) ‘harmonic’ one. Taking Chinese as a starting point, the assumption that the concept of stability itself – although inaccessible to the child acquirer and only observable with hindsight by the linguist – is an inbuilt part of human language and hence of universal grammar, is shown to be wrong.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Preliminaries on evolutionary terminology
    • 1.2The concept of cross-categorial harmony in formal syntax: The head parameter and its subsequent versions
    • 1.3Chinese as a stable disharmonic language par excellence
    • 1.4Organization of the article
  • 2.What did not change in Chinese during the last 3000 years
    • 2.1Head-initial extended verbal projection up to TP: ‘S > Neg > Aux > V > O’
    • 2.2Opposite head-directionality within the extended nominal projection: Head-final NP in a head-initial DP
      • 2.2.1Head-final NP
      • 2.2.2Head-initial DP
    • 2.3Prepositional Phrases
  • 3.‘Innovations’: Phenomena emerging in the course of the attested history
    • 3.1Sentence-final particles (since 5th c. BC)
    • 3.2Postpositions (since 1st c. BC)
  • 4.What did change: The distribution of adjunct XPs
    • 4.1The distribution of adjunct phrases in pre-Archaic Chinese
      • 4.1.1‘S V (O) [adjunct XP]’
      • 4.1.2‘S [adjunct XP] V (O)’
      • 4.1.3‘[Adjunct XP] S V (O)’
    • 4.2The distribution of adjunct phrases in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) 5th c.–3rd c. BC
    • 4.3The distribution of adjunct phrases in subsequent stages
    • 4.4Wrap-up
  • 5.The different cases of surface ‘OV’ order
    • 5.1Surface ‘OV’ order in PAC: Focus clefts
    • 5.2The bǎ construction in Modern Mandarin
    • 5.3Argument PPs in preverbal position in Mandarin
  • 6.The Tangwang language
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.254.05dja
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