Tracing the Case Forming in Sinitic Languages and Varieties in the Gansu-Qinghai Linguistic Area

By tracing and comparing the corpus from the 1960s to the present, we have found that the case marking in Sinitic languages and varieties has been formed gradually. Amdo Tibetan, Mongolic, and Turkic languages have influenced the Sinitic languages at different periods and locations. The case system we can observe today constitutes a competition result from different languages. The accusative case marking is overwhelmingly attested in this area. It is clear that the type of accusative case marking used in Mongolic and Turkic languages prevails over that of ergative case marking seen in Tibetan languages. At the beginning time where Sinitic languages were changing the word order from VO to OV, preverbal direct objects, as well as indirect objects, were not marked by any case. The Hezheng dialect was the first to use an accusative/dative marker with a phonetic form [a] in the corpus from the 1960s. It seems that the postposition [xa] (under) in Sinitic languages could not be the source of this marker: it is a type of borrowing based on pattern models from other languages, while the phonetic form comes from the topic marker [a/xa] in Sinitic languages. In possession and experiencer sentences, the dative marker use can be found in published data after 80s. Our study shows that this dative marker has been formed later than the first type. As for the pronominal marking, the first and second person pronouns have performed earlier the case marking than the third person pronoun; moreover, the first and second person pronouns have experienced a coalescence.