The Historical Grammatical Evolution Of The Word-order Of Pronominal Objects In Chinese

The main difference in word-order between Archaic Chinese and Mandarin Chinese is that objects occur in preverbal position dominantly in Archaic Chinese and occur in postverbal position dominantly in Mandarin Chinese. This dissertation presents a fairly exhaustive study of the historical word-order change in pronominal objects and reasons of this word-order change.Our main conclusions are as follows. 1) The word-order change in pronominal objects had already began when written Chinese came into being. 2) Unlike interrogative pronominal objects, which are focused on compulsively in sentences, pronominal objects in negative sentences made a steady and speedy progress. 3) The historical grammatical evolutions in Chinese, such as the word-order change in prepositional phrases and vast increase of disyllables, caused a rapid progress for interrogative pronouns in postverbal position after the 7th century. 4) Until the 10th century, the whole change completed and SVO word-order became dominant.There is a general tendency that most languages should change into SVO order from SOV order and that's why pronominal objects change their position in Chinese.