Review of Lin 2019 Encoding motion events in Mandarin Chinese

2013

for their assistance and encouragement at various stages of writing this dissertationat. Especially, I would like to thank Chuan Lin for her emotional support. I would also like to show my gratitude to Xue Xia, Annie McCrea and Karl Neergaard for helping me retrieve advanced L2 Chinese learners. I am also grateful to Professor Xionghua Song and his graduate student Yinhua Du for assisting me in retrieving participants and administrating the study at the South-Central University of Nationalities in China. And also, I would like to thank my family in China, who have always had faith in me and believed in me. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my husband and my best friend, Edward Paul, for showing me that not all good things have to be hard to do. Without his patience, love and support, I would not be able to complete this dissertation in a timely manner. My thanks also go to my two beautiful daughters, Ivy and Apple. Thanks to Ivy for watching her baby sister during my writing, and thanks to Apple for being such an easygoing baby.

2014

The present study investigates the encoding of motion in Japanese motion verbs. Kita (1999) claimed that two Japanese motion verbs hairu ‘enter’ and deru ‘exit’ do not encode motion in transition but only encode change of state. Thus, hairu would not mean ‘enter’ but rather means ‘become inside’. Tsujimura (2002) replied to Kita (1999) by stating that his arguments do not hold and that these motion verbs pattern like other motion verbs, i.e. they encode transition. However, Tsujimura (2002) proposes another analysis of Japanese motion verbs whereby verbs that occur in transitive-intransitive pairs have properties of verbs of putting alongside their directed motion semantics, i.e. they can be interpreted in two ways. Other motion verbs that do not have a transitive counterpart do not display this putting verb semantics. This study aims at disentangling these two accounts by means of an acceptability judgment task in which participants judge sentences as descriptions of video clips. A...

Frontiers in Psychology - Language Sciences, 2018

This paper focuses on the patterns in the encoding of spatial motion events that play a major role in the acquisition of these type of expressions. The goal is to single out the semantic contribution of the linguistic items which surface in Chinese locative constructions. In this way, we intend to provide learners with an account of the spatial representation encoded in the Chinese language. In fact, Chinese grammar is often perceived as idiosyncratic, thus generating a frustration that turns into learned helplessness (Maier and Seligman, 1976). We will analyze Talmy (2000a,b) framework under the light of investigations such as Landau and Jackendoff (1993), Svenonius (2004, 2006, 2007), and Terzi (2010). It will be shown that in Chinese locative structures, the Axial Part information is signaled by localizers and can be specified only when the Ground is considered as an object with “axially determined parts” (Landau and Jackendoff, 1993). Thus, we will elaborate on present account on the localizer’s function (Peyraube, 2003; Lamarre, 2007; Lin, 2013) by showing that the localizer highlights an axially determined part within a reference object, consistently with Terzi (2010) definition of Place, and with Wu (2015) decomposition of Place into Ground and Axial Part. Moreover, it will be shown that the preposition zài ‘at’ encodes a Locative type of Motion event (Talmy, 2000b), thus, it is not semantically vacuous. Other categories will be presented, such as the semantic class of locational verbs (Huang, 1987). We will indicate the contexts wherein such notions can trigger the conceptual restructuring which enables adult learners to switch from L1 “thinking for speaking” to L2 “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1987). The paper is structured as follows: Section “Introduction” provides introduction to the theme; Section “Theoretical Framework” includes a surveys on the semantic and syntactic decompositions of spatial motion expressions; Section “Discussion” offers an account of the instantiation; the findings and the relevant pedagogical implications are presented in Section “Findings.”

Translation and Cross-cultural Communication Studies in the Asia Pacific , 2015

The paper aims to study how motion events are narrated in two English novels and their Chinese translations. Typologically, English is a satellite-framed language, while Chinese has been found to pattern with neither satellite-framed languages nor verb-framed languages. Some researchers have proposed that Chinese belongs to a third language type – equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004; Chen & Guo, 2009). This study investigates excerpts from two classic English novels and their Chinese translations. The results show that the Chinese translations not only rely on manner-of-motion verbs even more heavily than do the English originals, but also exhibit as diverse a range of manner-of-motion verb as were used in the English originals. In addition, path information expressed by verb particles and prepositions in English is largely retained through the use of V2 and V3 in the serial verb construction in Chinese. The results reveal important typological similarities between Chinese and English, lending support to Talmy’s (2009) contention that Chinese is an S-language.

Ampersand, 2020

This paper adopts the tenets of Cognitive Construction Grammar [1,2] and Cognitive Grammar [3,4] and applies them to the Caused-Motion Constructions in English and Chinese, which has not been effectively studied in the field. This comparative study attempts to fill the research gap. Simultaneously, this paper also challenges the traditional assumption that the Construction in Chinese is a verbal compound, and argues that it involves a Catenative structure and that it signals subordinate event structure. As such, this article considers the advantages of this approach by examining its major theses and principles.

Pragmatics & Cognition, 1995

This paper focuses on a distinction between two kinds of information in verb meanings: a highly structured, templatic part of the meaning, based on aspectual properties of the verb, and a part of the meaning which contributes to filling gaps in the templatic information. The two kinds of information d@er in the nature and degree of connections to encyclopedic world knowledge. This demarcation between the two kinds of information is related to the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, and may be clearly articulated using Krifka 's (1 992) formalization of a homomorphism from objects to events. Motion verbs, for which the concept of distance plays a crucial role in the gap-filling information, are shown to be special in a number of ways, due to the special properties of distance as encoded in the world knowledge of the speaker. The possible universality of these findings is also discussed.

seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.

Cognitive Linguistics, 1995

The purpose of this paper is to question some of the basic assumpiions concerning motion verbs. In particular, it examines the assumption that "come" and "go" are lexical universals which manifest a universal deictic Opposition. Against the background offive working hypotheses about the nature of'come" and ''go", this study presents a comparative investigation of t wo unrelated languages-Mparntwe Arrernte (Pama-Nyungan, Australian) and Longgu (Oceanic, Austronesian). Although the pragmatic and deictic "suppositional" complexity of"come" and "go" expressions has long been recognized, we argue that in any given language the analysis of these expressions is much more semantically and systemically complex than has been assumed in the literature. Languages vary at the lexical semantic level äs t o what is entailed by these expressions, äs well äs differing äs t o what constitutes the prototype and categorial structure for such expressions. The data also strongly suggest that, ifthere is a lexical universal "go", then this cannof be an inherently deictic expression. However, due to systemic Opposition with "come", non-deictic "go" expressions often take on a deictic Interpretation through pragmatic attribution. Thus, this crosslinguistic investigation of "come" and "go" highlights the need to consider semantics and pragmatics äs modularly separate.

2017

Space is an important domain of our cognitive system, which develops in children from an early age on and is often considered to be universal. However, languages vary greatly in the way they encode static and dynamic space. Much research conducted within the framework proposed by Talmy (1985, 2000) analyzed the expression of Path in voluntary motion. However, few studies have examined caused motion, especially in languages that are sometimes considered to be “equipollent” such as Chinese (Slobin 2004). Typological differences between languages also raise questions about the process of second language acquisition: do the typological properties of the source language influence motion expression in the target language? What developments can we expect in this area during the acquisition of a foreign language? To answer these questions, the present study examines how French learners of Chinese L2 at two proficiency levels (24 intermediate, 12 advanced) encode caused motion events in comp...

This paper revisitsthe issue of diachronic shift of linguistic typology with respect to lexicalization pattern of motion events (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000), with particular emphasis on language structure, as well as language use. This study compares the Chinese language with Romance languages, two groups of typologically different languages, and shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed toward a satellite-framed language; (ii) Romance languages show an inverse tendency of evolution, i.e., from satellite- toward verbframed; (iii) the mech anisms through which Chinese and Romance undergo typological shift are opposite as well. The mechanisms of pattern shift in Chinese include grammaticalization, analogy of verb-complement construction, and split of semantic components, but mechanisms applied to Romance are strong lexicalization and integration of semantic elements; and (iv) Both Chinese (including Old Chinese and Modern Chinese) and Modern Romance show a certain degree of diversity in terms of lexicalization patterns, which is due to the maintenance-and-shift in these languages and linguistic relics inherited from their old ancestors.

Languages differ in the ways they divide the world. This study applies cluster analysis to understand how and why languages differ in the way they express motion events. It further lays out what the parameters of the structure of the semantic space of motion are, based on data collected from participants who were adult speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish. The participants described 37 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study show that the segmentation of the semantic space displays a great deal of variation across all three groups. Turkish differs from German and Danish with respect to the features used to segment the semantic space -namely by using vector orientation. German and Danish differ greatly with respect to (a) how fine-grained the distinctions made are, and (b) how motion verbs with a common Germanic root are distributed across the semantic space. Consequently, this study illustrates that the parameters applied for categorization by speakers are, to some degree, related to typological membership, in relation to Talmy's typological framework for the expression of motion events. Finally, the study shows that the features applied for categorization differ across languages and that typological membership is not necessarily a predictor of elaboration of the motion verb lexicon. Linguistik online 61, 4/13 ISSN 1615-3014 60

Language Learning, 2011

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework—Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events—to investigate how L2 Chinese learners come to express motion events in a target-like manner. Fifty-five US university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A controlled composition task and a picture-cued written task were administered to elicit learners’ knowledge and degree of mastery of Chinese spatial morphemes, also known as directional complements (DCs). Analysis of learners’ interlanguage data shows that the difficulties came from the syntactic complexity of the target DC patterns and from the typological features of Chinese as a serial-verb language. The dual functions of DCs as path satellites and as independent verbs posed considerable difficulty for the learners whose L1, English, encodes path by means of satellites only. Based on the results, a developmental order of mastery of L2 Chinese DCs is proposed. The study illuminates areas of difficulty in adjusting to the L2 thinking-for-speaking patterns (Cadierno, 2004, 2008; Slobin, 1996a) that arise when differences in spatial categorization and in conventionalized ways of path encoding exist between the L1 and L2.

The Construal of Spatial Meaning, 2013

Setting the scene-the cognitive semiotics of motion The present paper argues that the lexico-grammar of spatial Motion (as a supercategory for dynamic movement and static location, cf. Talmy 1985) cannot be understood except as an integral part of the semiotic triad of reality, mind, and language. M otion in language should thus be explained on the basis of the (Gestaltist) psychology of motion in perception, in that language 'structures' the mind's construction of motion in reality. Accordingly, the typology of motion verbs is based on an experientially founded typology of motional situations in mind. A mental motional situation is perceptual, or 'pictorial': Human beings perceive motional situations in reality by forming (concrete) 'pictures' of them with diverse figureground constellations-and recognize them as belonging to different categories (according to stored percepts). There are two kinds of picture, viz. static, or 'stable', and dynamic, or 'unstable', roughly according as the figure is static or dynamic. Furthermore, we seem to be able to construct only one situational picture at a time. A single situational picture is a simple mental Situation-a stable picture is a 'state', and an unstable picture an 'activity'. So far the notion of M otion has been Perceptual. Now, it goes without saying that the 'mentality' of Situations involves much more than simple perceptual Situations, in that situations may be conceived of as possibly integrated with one another into 'complex' Situations. A "snapshot" of what at first sight might seem to be only a state or an activity may thus show out to be the endpoint or the starting point "window", respectively, on an integrated, complex Situation involving an Activity and a State, what will be called an Action. In the first case, the State in focus would be preceded by a causal Activity; in the second case the Activity in focus would be succeeded by a resultant State, in the normal course of events. The connection between the two simple Situations in a complex actional Situation is a general relation of telicity, the causal Activity tending to actually eventuate in the resultant State. The state-focused Action will be termed an Event, whereas an activity-focused Action will be termed a Process. Illustrating this, we may conceive of a scenario where I am sitting alone in the drawing room, then leave for the kitchen and come back, and lo and behold, you are sitting there! This may be conceived of as a M otion Situation, viz. a M otion Event, where you are sitting here as a result of your, say, returning home from work, and I may second it by the utterance Nå, du er kommet hjem fra arbejde 'oh, you've come home from work'. In this case the motion for me was only conceptual, in that I didn't see, or otherwise witness it, but only inferred it. We may thus talk about Conceptual motion in such cases. When now turning to language (as a system) and the typology of motion verbs in the mental lexicon, we must add the Sign Vehicle, i.e. the phonological expression, as a representation of Percean Firstness. The linguistic Sign Object (Secondness) and Sign Interpretant (Thirdness) then recall the mental perceptual and conceptual structures, respectively, just mentioned. So the sign contents are twofold , the linguistic cognitive-semantic domain being bipartitioned into an (abstract) perception-based 'imaginal' representation (cf. Spatial Structure in Jackendoff 2002) and an (abstract) conception-based 'ideational' representation (cf. Conceptual Structure in Jackendoff 2002). 1. Background, aims, and scope 1.1 Lexicalization typology M otion event research has grown into a well-established and highly productive field. Its theoretical cornerstone are the classic studies by Talmy (1975, 1985; for further refinements, see 2000: 25ff.), supplemented by works primarily by Slobin (e.g. 1996a/b; 2004a/b), but also by others (for an overview, see M ora Gutiérrez 2001). Despite the overwhelming amount of specific works within motion event research and despite the seemingly growing awareness of the need for a more fine-grained, less schematic approach than the Talmy-Slobin framework, the core assumptions and variables of the framework nevertheless are still upheld. Talmy's basic assumption is that even though people's pre-linguistic conceptualization of e.g. a directed M otion Situation appears to be universal-involving the same fundamental components to be lexicalized (apart from Figure and Ground, Motion itself, Manner of M otion, or Cause, and Path (i.e. trajectory), the ways of linguistically lexicalizing it in different languages are not the same because not all the components are able to be colexicalized in the same (verbal) morpheme in a major lexicalization system (Talmy 1985: 76): apart from cases where only M otion is lexicalized in the verb, as in English move, either the M anner component co-lexicalizes with the M otion component in the verb, leaving the Path behind to be lexicalized in a so-called Satellite, as in M anner languages, or it is the Path component that is lexically 'incorporated' into the verb, in so-called verb-framed or Path languages, whereby the M anner component becomes secondary, left for optional expression in a con-verb or adverb. Thus, we have a nice binary typology of major lexicalization patterns, and derivatively of languages, in that it is assumed that at least most languages fit into one of these types:  Manner (or, satellite-framed) languages, like e.g., Danish, Swedish, English, German, Russian, and Chinese, where only the Manner of motion is lexicalized in the verb root together with M otion, while the direction or Path of motion is explicated elsewhere when

Studies in Chinese Linguistics, 2017

This article proposes an analysis of the Motion-Directional Construction in Chinese in the Conceptual-Cognitive approach as outlined by Jackendoff and Langacker. This article first argues that the Motion-Directional Construction consists of conceptual subordination, expressing different mental spaces. Then, it examines the syntactic and semantic behaviors of the construction arguing that it is more like a constructional idiom. In particular, we discuss the case of pa ‘climb’ and generalize further that the motion verbs in Chinese typically express manners of movement. Within the Conceptual Semantics, we argue that a level of grammatical relation may not be necessary; it is the argument and conceptual structures that we need in the cognitive structure. Finally, we present the data and suggest the typological relevance of the Motion-Directional Construction.

Lingua, 2011

The domain of space presents a certain number of interesting properties. Although spatial understanding by human beings is determined by a common set of biological characteristics (e.g. the visual and the haptic-kinaesthetic systems) and thus thought to be universal, linguistic systems encoding spatial information show striking typological differences depending on whether they provide 'satellite-framed' versus 'verb-framed' systems (Talmy, 2000). Thus, satellite-framed languages (e.g. Germanic) typically encode Manner and/or Cause in verb roots and Path in satellites (i.e. (1a)). By contrast, verb-framed languages (e.g. Romance) typically express Path or Manner and Cause in main verbs, providing peripheral and less compact structures for the description of complex motion events (i.e. (1b)). Yet other languages (such as Chinese) conveniently package motion components in verb compounds (e.g. tui-xia 'push-descend' in (1c)) thereby presenting their own typological status, which can be described either as 'equipollent framing' (Slobin, 2004) or as a 'parallel' system (i.e. having both satellite-and verb-framing properties, Talmy, 2009). 1