Positioning of Chinese time nouns and adverbs: Evidence from corpus, acceptability, and processing studies.

ABSTRACT: This study examines the syntactic placement and cognitive processing of time nouns and time adverbs in Mandarin Chinese, a language without overt tense morphology, highlighting how these temporal expressions interface with Chinese grammar. Study 1 analyzed a large-scale natural language corpus (BLCU Chinese Corpus) to determine the typical positions of time nouns and time adverbs relative to the subject. The results revealed distinct distributional patterns: time nouns occurred flexibly either before or after the subject, while time adverbs appeared predominantly in post-subject (sentence-internal) positions. Study 2 investigated native Mandarin speakers' acceptability judgments of sentences with time expressions in various positions. Sentences in which time nouns followed the subject were

SUBMITTER: Chen JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12310041 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature