Cognitive and sociolectal constraints on the theme-recipient alternation: evidence from Mandarin

Abstract

Abstract We explore the cognitive and sociolectal constraints that probabilistically regulate the theme-recipient (or “dative”) alternation in modern varieties of Mandarin and how these constraints interact with each other. Based on an extensively annotated corpus dataset and regression modeling, we found that the probabilistic grammar that shapes the theme-recipient alternation is fundamentally stable across regional and genre varieties of Mandarin. This general stability notwithstanding, significant variation regarding the importance of cognitive constraints across different sociolectal constraints is detected. Crucially, the analysis revealed that recipient syntactic complexity has a much greater effect in Taiwan Mandarin than in Mainland Mandarin. The effect of theme concreteness is also found to be significantly reduced in telephone conversations compared to broadcast news. Corpus-based findings were cross-validated using a psycholinguistic rating task experiment. While the results of the two approaches demonstrate substantial overlap, they also exhibit diverging patterns at the level of interaction between regional variety and recipient complexity, potentially indicating nuanced differences between the two approaches. The findings provide evidence that interactional patterns between cognitive and sociolectal constraints on probabilistic grammatical alternations may be shared across languages, despite their distinct socio-cultural factors that shape variation in human interaction.