Abstract
Investigating some word order phenomena in Chinese, we will arrive at the conclusion that Chinese has to be characterised as a VO language. The evidence is drawn mainly from the behaviour of locative PPs. Making extensive comparisons with the behaviour of locative PPs in Dutch, we show that in Chinese, all locative adjunct PPs appear on the left-hand side of the verb, whereas predicative complements follow the verb. Contrary to the communis opinio, we claim that this generalization holds unconditionally.
We briefly touch upon some consequences of this result for the theory of directionality. One of these consequences is that the OV/VO distinction can and should be cast in terms of a Theta Directionality parameter. Other parameters that have been proposed in the literature, especially Headedness, are irrelevant to accounting for the Chinese word-order facts.
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Mulder, R., Sybesma, R. Chinese is a VO language. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 10, 439–476 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133370
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133370