The postverbal constraint and the better patterner shift in Chinese dialects

Chinese is well-known for some rare exceptions to otherwise nearly exceptionless typological generalizations regarding cross-categorial harmony in word order. One of them is the Postverbal Constraint, a general tendency (found in no other known VO languages) that the main verb may not be followed by more than one phrasal constituent. Over recent four decades this unusual constraint has attracted substantial attention, particularly by generative grammarians and typologists; nonetheless it remains puzzling why and how Chinese ends up with this gross deviation from typological regularity. Based on comprehensive surveys of Chinese dialects in recent years, Zhang (2010, 2011, 2015) observes that the Constraint manifests itself as a scalar gradation across modern Sinitic varieties both geographically and syntactically. The constraint on the number of postverbal elements increases incrementally from non-Mandarin dialects in the south to Mandarin varieties in north and northeast China, and thence to Mandarin dialects in remote northwestern hinterlands. However, this observation of the “Postverbal Constraint Continuum” presents just part of the picture, as it pertains more to the quantity rather than categorical status of the postverbal elements allowed in Chinese dialects. This paper aims to make one step forward toward a holistic understanding of the Postverbal Constraint in not merely Standard Mandarin but the whole Sinitic taxon and over its documented history, by identifying a general diachronic tendency in Chinese that goes along with the formation of the Postverbal Constraint, called the “Better Patterner Shift”. The proposal relies on a crucial redefinition of Dryer’s (1992) concept of “patterner” (and subsequently “good/bad patterners”). First of all, cross-categorial harmony is viewed as structural isomorphism, and an automorphism is thus a special case of isomorphism f: GG. It then logically follows that the “best patterner” of Object is itself (i.e., automorphism). A “better patterner” of O is thus defined as a verb dependent that more resembles the prototypical object: a single non-agentive, nominal, indefinite/non-specific DO. Therefore it also follows that (“>” read as “better than”): (i) 1 complement > 2 complements; (ii) complements > adjuncts; (iii) objects > non-objects; (iv) nominal complements > predicative complements; (v) nominal adjuncts > predicative adjuncts, etc. Once the new concept of “better patterner” is established, we are set out to find a series of seemingly unrelated syntactic changes involving various types of postverbal dependents of the verb (many of the changes are ongoing) in modern Chinese dialects (particularly northern ones) – as well as throughout the history of Chinese since the Late Archaic period – converging to a single direction: towards a better patterner of DO.