The development of VOC to VCO in Mai-Cantonese of Sanya in Hainan

This paper examines an on-going change of the resultative verb construction (結果補語) in the Mai (邁話) dialect spoken in Sanya (三亞), Hainan Province. Our fieldwork data show that two patterns co-exist for the resultative verb construction which differ in terms of the relative word order of the complement (C) and the object (O): VOC vs. VCO (such as da laoshu si 打老鼠死vs. dasi laoshu 打死老鼠 ‘beat the mouse to death’). After considering a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors as well as the results of our fieldwork conducted among native Mai speakers of different ages, we argue that VOC is an older pattern while the VCO pattern is used more often by younger speakers, which can be primarily attributed to the influence of Standard Chinese as a result of language contact. Copyright © 2013 Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.