Word Order in Mandarin Chinese and Grammatical Relations
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been argued by LaPolla (1993LaPolla ( , 1995) ) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) --among others -that word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) is (almost) exclusively determined by informational/communicative considerations.Though it cannot be denied that word order does encode informative/communicative considerations such as identifiability, foregrounding, and focalization, it is argued here that word order also encodes grammatical relations and that word order in MC can be nicely accounted for if stated in terms of subject, direct and indirect object.To put it briefly, in both communicatively unmarked and marked basic/ordinary sentences, the subject must occur in immediate pre-verbal position (except for unidentifiable subjects in basic sentences), and the indirect object necessarily appears in immediate post-verbal position.If subjects and (morphologically unmarked) indirect objects occupy any other position, the sentence is ungrammatical.As for the direct object, it must appear in immediate post-verbal position in unmarked ordinary monotransitive sentences and immediately after the indirect object in unmarked ordinary ditransitive sentences.Note that the thematic role of the subject, direct object, or indirect object does not affect word order in any way.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it