A multivariate corpus analysis of locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract This study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the semantics and pragmatics associated with locative inversion (LI), a construction characterised by a preverbal locative phrase and a postverbal noun phrase. While previous studies have suggested that newness, definiteness, and heaviness are responsible for licensing locative inversion, few have examined the effect of one of these factors in conjunction with the other two. Many claims about locative inversion have not been quantitatively assessed. In response, this study presents a quantitative analysis of 899 instances including 562 LI and 337 uninverted constructions (non-LI) collected from the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Corpus, providing further empirical evidence for the effects of discourse information, the definiteness effect, and heaviness observed in the literature. Among other factors, discourse information shows a more pronounced effect. The result also introduces the novel finding of the effect of animacy on the choice of locative variants, a topic not yet discussed in existing studies. Additionally, an examination of verb semantics reveals varying preferences for locative variants among verbs. The finding that unergative verbs and non-passivized transitive verbs are found in locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese challenges the conventional belief that locative inversion serves as an unaccusative diagnostic.