This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba sentences and SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba /SVO sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages.

中文翻译：

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预测普通话的句法选择：基于语料库的ba句子和SVO句子分析

本文研究了10个因素对汉语普通话替换句子和SVO句子选择的影响。这些因素是NP2的给定性，确定性，生气勃勃和代词性，NP2长度，VP长度，动词义，句法平行性，依存距离和令人惊讶。使用语料库数据和混合效应逻辑回归模型，我们发现，一方面，给定性，句法并行性以及NP2长度和VP长度的对数转换比率是ba句子和SVO句子之间选择的重要预测因子。新的NP2，较大的长度比和并行的结构可以预测SVO语句，而不是ba语句。另一方面，通过三字母组合模型估计的依存距离和意外惊喜有效地预测了自然出现的ba / SVO句子与其他句子之间的选择。与转换后的句子相比，自然出现的句子更可能具有较短的依存距离和较小的惊奇值。这五个因素对句法选择的影响与以前的研究结果一致，这表明某些句法选择的决定因素在语言之间是共享的。