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What's educated Mandarin?

Bibliography

鄧盾, '再論動詞能否做定語', 辭書研究, 5 (2025), 74.
尹常樂－袁毓林, '動詞能否做定語', 語言教學與研究, 225 (2024), 38.

Consider the following expressions:

  1. 表彰勞模1大會
  2. 招收研究生辦法
  3. 審查資格小組
  4. 保護熊貓組織

Any competent editor would immediately correct them to:

  1. 勞模表彰大會
  2. 研究生招收辦法
  3. 資格審查小組 or 來審查資格的小組
  4. 熊貓保護組織

And yet both Yin (a native of Taiyüan) and Teng (who's based in Hong Kong) accepted the first version without a qualm. Examples like these abound in today's grammatical scholarship.

The variety of Mandarin described here is one which, if used in Shanghai, won't associate the speaker2 with any specific areas of China or educational background.

  1. 勞模 is a sort of honours list distributed by communists. ↩

  2. Which subsumes 'writer'. ↩