Chapter 5
Disharmony in harmony with diachronic stability
The case of Chinese
Redouane Djamouri | Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, CNRS-EHESS-INALCO
Waltraud Paul | 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
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References