The discourse functions of patient fronting: A comparative study of biblical hebrew and chinese

Empirical studies of word-order variation (e.g. Givòn 1983a; Sun and Givòn 1985; Herring 1990) have suggested the possibility of determining universal factors affecting this variation. The present paper contributes to this investigation by giving a detailed comparison of the factors affecting the order of verb and Patient in two genetically unrelated languages, Biblical Hebrew and Chinese, which show comparable frequencies of the basic word-order patterns. Using both original and translation data, it is shown that in terms of factors affecting word order, these languages have a number of differences and only two similarities: both front Patients that appear in the second clause in a contrastive pair and both front Patients in certain situations in which the verb is followed by a locative/directional PP.