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This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject).
Since the mid-1970's, the question of whether or not a verb agreement system1 (VAS) should be reconstructed for Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB) has been a controversial topic, but because of the large amount of work published arguing in favor of reconstructing a VAS for PTB, especially by James J. Bauman (1974, 1975a, 1975b, 1979) and Scott DeLancey (1980, 1983, 1988, 1989, to appear), many people have begun to accept the existence of a VAS in PTB as received knowledge. In a recent paper on verb agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman, Scott DeLancey states that 'There can no longer be any serious doubt that a system of verb agreement must be attributed to Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB)' (DeLancey 1988: 1). Though the number of papers supporting this position is quite large, I would like to raise several serious doubts about the theoretical and methodological basis for reconstructing a VAS for PTB' and at the same time argue for the use of functionally and typologically based theories of grammar, as exemplified by the head-marking/dependent-marking distinction developed in Nichols 1986, in diachronic syntax and syntactic reconstruction.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
In LaPolla 1990, I presented arguments to show that Chinese is a language in which there has been no grammaticalizalion of the syntactic relations "subject" and "object". This being the case, then syntactic relations cannot be what determines word order in Chinese. In this paper I will argue that, aside from a semantic rule that the actor of a verb, if expressed, must precede that verb, it is pragmatic relations (information structure) that are the main determinants of word order in Chinese.
Middle voice marking is very rarely recognized as such in the grammars written on Tibeto-Burman languages. It is often simply treated as a normal direct reflexive or as an intransitivizer. In order to draw the attention of scholars to the existence and function of middle voice marking in Tibeto-Burman languages, the present paper discusses the form and function of middle marking in several of these languages. We will first discuss key facts about middle marking in general, then discuss the individual Tibeto-Burman examples.
Dulong/Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken on both sides of the China/Myanmar (Burma) border just south and cast of Tibet. [...] In this chapter, I will be using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and intergroup communication, though most of the phenomena we will be discussing are general to dialects in both China and Myanrnar. I will use the short form 'Rawang' in referring to this dialect.
Ever since the publication of Greenberg 1963, word order typologists have attempted to formulate and refine implicational universals of word order so as to characterize the restricted distribution of certain word order patterns, and in some cases have also attempted to develop general principles to explain the existence of those universals.