Abstract Previous research has tracked the history of the theme-recipient alternation (or: “dative” alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis in a probabilistic variationist framework. Against this backdrop, we explore the language-internal and language-external factors that probabilistically influence the alternation between theme-first and recipient-first ordering in a large diachronic corpus of Chinese writing (1300s–1900s). Our analysis reveals that the recipient-first variant is consistently more frequent than its competitor and even more common in more recent texts than in older texts. Regression analysis also suggests that there are stable linguistic constraints (i.e., animacy and definiteness of theme) and fluid constraints (i.e., end-weight, recipient animacy). Notably, the diachronic instability of end-weight and animacy points to cross-linguistic parallels for ditransitive constructions, including the English dative alternation. We thus contribute to theory building in variationist linguistics by advancing the field’s knowledge about the comparative fluidity versus stability of probabilistic constraints.

中文翻译：

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汉语主语-接受者交替：追踪七个世纪的句法变化

摘要 以往的研究已经追踪了汉语中主位-受主交替（或：“与格”交替）的历史，但很少有研究将其分析嵌入概率变分框架中。在此背景下，我们探讨了在大型历时中文写作语料库（1300-1900 年代）中可能影响主题优先和接受者优先顺序交替的语言内部和语言外部因素。我们的分析表明，收件人优先变体始终比其竞争对手更频繁，甚至在较新的文本中比在旧文本中更常见。回归分析还表明存在稳定的语言约束（即主题的活力和确定性）和流动的约束（即最终权重、接受者的活力）。尤其，end-weight 和 animacy 的历时不稳定性指出了双及物结构的跨语言相似性，包括英语与格交替。因此，我们通过推进该领域关于概率约束的比较流动性与稳定性的知识，为变分语言学的理论构建做出了贡献。