Skip Navigation


Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on September 13, 2007
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2007 22(4):419-434; doi:10.1093/llc/fqm017
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
22/4/419    most recent
fqm017v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Hu, X.
Right arrow Articles by Williamson, N.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Syntactic Positions of Prepositional Phrases in the History of Chinese: Using the Developing Sheffield Corpus of Chinese for Diachronic Linguistic Studies

Xiaoling Hu and Jamie McLaughlin

University of Sheffield, UK

Nigel Williamson

Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Correspondence: Dr. Xiaoling Hu, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Floor 5, The Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail: x.l.hu{at}sheffield.ac.uk

  Abstract

This paper reports the completion of the first expansion phase of the Sheffield Corpus of Chinese (SCC). We describe the major improvements we made in expanding the corpus. They involve the coverage of time periods, choice of text types and categories, and selection of individual texts; the mark up scheme and the integral search and analysis tool. We use the developing SCC to examine Li and Thompson's; (1974, 1975, 1976) controversial postverbal predominance hypothesis for prepositional phrases (PPs) in Archaic Chinese and their word order change hypothesis for PPs in general in the history of the Chinese language. Our study provides no evidence for the postverbal predominance hypothesis for PPs in Archaic Chinese and the word order change hypothesis for PPs in general from postverbal in Archaic Chinese to preverbal in Modern Chinese. Our findings show that postverbal and preverbal PPs have been in coexistence and there have always been more occurrences of preverbal PPs than postverbal PPs in all the time periods covered in the current SCC. Although use of some PPs declined in some time periods and use of others emerged in other time periods, there was never a predominant position for PPs in any time period in the history of Chinese. We show differences in the distribution of PPs in different time periods and provide an account of the syntactic positions of PPs in those time periods.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.