The medieval Chinese Buddhist scriptures and the development of the Chinese patient-subject clause:A case study on the pattern of the effect of the Buddhist scripture translation on Chinese grammar

In medieval Chinese,there appeared a new type of the patient-subject clause with the topic-comment structure,in which the resumptive pronoun zhi(之)was no longer used after the verb.This paper finds that there are more patient-subject clauses of the new type in the Chinese translation of Buddhist Scriptures.It argues that besides the spontaneous evolution of the construction itself,the OV word order in Sanskrit Buddhist Scriptures had an important effect on the development of the new type.Based on a Sanskrit-Chinese comparative analysis,the paper analyses the effect pattern involved in the translation of the Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese.