“A corpus-based study on the postposition of the subordinative clause in the vernacular novels during the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China 1840 - 1928”

Ever since the linguist Wang Li expressed himself in the 1940s by claiming that “The Europeanization of grammar has been an event of great consequence in the history of our language” many scholars have begun to study the Europeanization of Chinese from a linguistic perspective. At the lexical level rich results have been achieved, but we cannot say the same for syntax: the most recent studies show that the corpus collected by most researchers is not enough representative and systematic, the data sampling is not sufficiently broad, and furthermore, researchers did not pay due attention to the transition phase between jindai hanyu and xiandai hanyu, which occurred during the final period of the Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China (1840 - 1928). In fact, the late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China witnessed the rapid development in Chinese society and the old and the new language system were in dynamic change. Among the syntax Europeanized phenomena, one of the most significant is the phenomenon of the postposition of the subordinate clause to the main clause, since it alters one of the bases of the traditional syntactic structure of the Chinese sentence. This phenomenon does not seem to have been taken into consideration in the studies conducted on digital corpora in a diachronic perspective.