Despite the vast body of literature on the historical development of the theme-recipient alternation (also known as the “dative” alternation) in Chinese, most studies that have been conducted so far are limited to philological recounts of the binary choice between the prepositional dative and the ditransitive dative across dynasties, which usually spanned centuries. Against this backdrop, we conduct a state-of-the-art variationist analysis of the four variants, utilizing a large and richly annotated diachronic dataset based on a corpus of Chinese texts (1300s–1900s). Using conditional inference trees and conditional random forest analysis, we demonstrate that end-weight effects are the most stable linguistic constraint on variation, while definiteness and animacy of the theme constituent tend to be more fluid. Supplementary distinctive collexeme analysis reveals a strong collostructional interplay between verbs and the variants, including changes involving the prototypical verb of GIVING 给gĕi.

中文翻译：

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超越朝代和二元交替：中文主题接收者结构四向变异性的历时语料库研究

尽管有大量关于汉语主语-受主交替（也称为“与格”交替）历史发展的文献，但迄今为止进行的大多数研究仅限于对介词与格之间的二元选择进行语言学叙述。以及跨朝代的双及物与格，通常跨越几个世纪。在此背景下，我们利用基于中文文本语料库（1300 年代至 1900 年代）的大型且注释丰富的历时数据集，对这四种变体进行了最先进的变体分析。使用条件推理树和条件随机森林分析，我们证明最终权重效应是对变化最稳定的语言约束，而主题成分的明确性和活力往往更加流动。盖伊。