An Investigation Of The Objective Case Of Minority National Languages In China

The main function of objective case is to indicate patient.China is a multinational country with multiple languages.There are two ways to encode objective case in different ethnic languages,one is word order encoding,the other is morphological encoding,including word form and function word.By examining the corpus of Chinese national languages,we find that all of the languages use“parataxis” to distinguish agent from patient.When the relationship between agent and patient is clear,the word order is very free,and the use of morphological symbols is not strict.However,when the relationship between agent and patient is not clear,word order is greatly restricted,and the use of morphological symbols is especially strict.This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon from the following aspects: identifiability precedence,semantic proximity and topicality.In addition,through the investigation of the distribution of objective case in Chinese national languages,we also find the related phenomenon of objective case: in SVO languages,the use of objective case is the least.SOV languages are the second.V-headed languages,including VSO and VOS,not only use objective case most,but also use subject case widely too.This article makes the preliminary explanation to this phenomenon.