This paper investigates the use of BA construction in Mandarin Chinese discourse with two frequently-occurring Chinese verbs 放 fang ("v. to put") and 拿 na ("v. to take"). Previous literature suggests that the use of BA construction is influenced by a number of factors, including semantic meaning of the verb phrase and prominence and weight of the object NP. However, what is unclear is how these factors work together in conditioning word order variation (BA vs. SVO) in real context, especially regarding the effects of object NP prominence and weight and their interaction. In this study, we explore this issue by building corpus-based statistical models for predicting the use of BA construction in context. Our results show that for both verbs 放 fang and 拿 na, the use of BA construction is sensitive to the prominence (especially givenness) and weight of the object NP as well as structural parallelism, while no interaction effects were found. Furthermore, the weight effects are in opposite directions in the two models, raising new questions regarding the nature of heavy NP shift and revealing a great degree of cross-verb differences in word order variation.
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