Word Order Type of Mandarin Chinese Revisited on Pairs of Grammatical Elements Correlated and Uncorrelated with OV-VO
Abstract
This paper revisits the word order type of Mandarin Chinese based on the fifteen pairs of grammatical elements correlated with VO-OV language types and other seven uncorrelated pairs.Among the correlated fifteen pairs, ten are relevant to Mandarin Chinese and the other five absent or atypical, while the seven uncorrelated pairs do not show exotic cases.The research indicates that, in the correlated ten pairs, Mandarin Chinese has four pairs exhibiting both OV and VO word orders, three pairs tend to be OV order, and the last three VO order.So Mandarin Chinese should probably be regarded as an OV-VO mixed word order type language.