The first-person alternation and the pre-Qin pronominal system: a preregistered corpus adjudication
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Preregistration deposit for an exhaustive, corpus-based adjudication of the Old Chinese first-person alternation (吾/我), extended to the wider pre-Qin pronominal ladder (余/予; 爾/汝). Six hypothesis families from a century of debate — morphological case, person-conditioned split within S, predicate-type conditioning, syntactically conditioned case, chronological succession, and register conditioning — are stated as competing distributional predictions over a single alignment-agnostic coding grid (role, verb class, clause type, position, date band, register, tier) prior to any extraction or tabulation. The deposit comprises (1) the frozen text universe: 26 sources across three tiers (received, excavated, epigraphic) with documented admissibility rulings and exclusions, and (2) the preregistered protocol: coding scheme, hypothesis signatures, analysis plan, and robustness battery, including received-versus-excavated parallel comparisons. Outcome files will be added to this project on completion; per-file timestamps document that design preceded coding. Source texts are public domain, obtained from the Kanseki Repository (CHANT-derived base editions) with the Chinese Text Project as cross-check.
Author: Shayne Beckham
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7204226271
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