The Evolutionary Mechanisms of Transitivization in Mandarin VO Compounds: A Corpus-Driven Study of Competing Alternations

This study investigates the evolutionary mechanisms of transitivization in Mandarin verb-object (VO) compounds, addressing the core question of why this change diffuses at uneven rates across different lexical items. Based on a large-scale corpus analysis of 102 VO compounds, we reveal a significant statistical pattern: the transitivity frequency of a VO compound is positively correlated with the presence of a competing Verb-Complement (VC) construction ([VO1 Prep O2]) and negatively correlated with an Adverbial-Verb (AV) construction ([Prep O2 VO1]). To explain these findings, this study proposes a cost-based evolutionary framework. We argue that these correlations reflect different evolutionary pathways, embodying different evolutionary costs. The VC pathway represents a low-cost, direct route driven by grammaticalization, where the reanalysis of a semantically bleached preposition facilitates rapid diffusion. In contrast, the AV pathway is a high-cost, indirect route inhibited by a dual cost: its output violates the “Dependency Length Minimization” (DLM) principle and neutralizes the source construction’s crucial information-structuring function. This framework provides a principled explanation for the observed statistical patterns, linking synchronic variation to diachronic mechanisms. It frames the uneven transitivization of VO compounds as a gradual lexical diffusion shaped by the competition between evolutionary pathways of differing cognitive and functional costs.