Preferred Argument Structure in Chinese: A Comparison Among Conversations, Narratives and Written Texts

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between information flow and preferred argument structure across different text types. A number of studies in both ergative and accusative languages confirm Du Bois’ (1987) grammatical constrains. Chinese is neither an ergative nor accusative language. The results of my Chinese data do not truly confirm Du Bois’ constraints. Transitivity is found to be the main key to trigger the discrepancy on argument types distribution between Sacapultec and Chinese. Ellipsis, lack of case-marking system, text difference and topic continuity are assumed to play significant roles on distribution of argument structure and information status in terms of grammatical roles. Chinese spoken discourse and written texts display the similar grammatical constraints and information statuses. The consistent tendency shows that new information prefers O role and given information favors roles A and S. Given information appear relatively less in conversations than in narratives and written texts.