Contrastive Study Of Motion Events In English And Chinese Narratives: The Syntax-Semantic Interface

This study examines how Chinese conceptualizes translocational motion events as compared to English. Talmy's (1975, 1985, 1991) seminal categorization of verb-framed versus satellite-framed language types provides the frame in which we examine mapping preferences exemplified by each language in narrative discourse. Talmy considers Chinese a satellite-framed language, exciting a lot of debates (Shen 2003, Tai 2003). Before we evaluate Talmy's claim, we make a comprehensive comparison of the distinctive properties between English and Chinese with regard to translocational events. Firstly, we take a verb repertoire view of lexicalization patterns. We find that in comparison to English, Chinese has more indigenous path verbs, which are rather active in realizing path information. We classify three types of path verbs in Chinese: (a) general path verbs; (b) directional verbs; and (c) deictic verbs. Each of them can act as the independent main verb in a clause, usually followed by a ground object. They can also occur successively in the order of (a)+(c), (b)+(c), or (a)+(b)+(c). Furthermore, (b) and (c) by themselves as well as the combination form (a)+(c) can be preceded by a manner-of-motion verb. Chinese has a comparable repertoire of general manner-of-motion verbs to English. Chinese speakers encode manner of motion at a high rate by frequent and diverse uses of compound construction and serial verb construction, where the first verb slot is invariably occupied by a manner-of-motion verb. Significant differences between English and Chinese arise from fine-grained manner-of-motion verbs. Chinese speakers make use of such alternatives as adverbs, adjectives and adverbials to encode manner of motion, thus compensating for the relative difficulty of encoding both path and elaborate manner in verbal constructions. For English speakers, those alternatives usually serve the function of augmenting the manner that was already encoded by the verb.Next, we adopt a constructional approach to complex translocational motion events, investigating caused motion constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and the ba construction. We find that English caused motion constructions in general are more suggestive of mental blending (Fauconnier 1997, Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The ba construction is a ready expression for most caused motion events. Both caused motion constructions in English and the ba construction in Chinese are syntactic configurations that can profile causee and causation.We also investigate how many ground elements can be expressed in a single clause. English allows one to compactly package as many as three ground elements in relation to a single manner-of-motion verb along with a collection of locative elements indicating path. By contrast, Chinese often need introduce each ground object or spatial prepositional phrase by a separate verb. Thus, English speakers are more able than Chinese speakers to present detailed and granular path descriptions with low processing cost (Slobin 2000) in a clause. Chinese speakers tend to break a complex path into several segments, presenting them by means of a series of action clauses. On a few occasions, Chinese speakers also skip one or two path sections.Last we check on the results of the investigation by analyzing two English versions of the Chinese classic Hong Lou Meng. We find that the characteristics shared by two versions confirm the distinctive properties uncovered by our investigation for English and Chinese. We believe that the results can be applied to translation criticism as well.We study translocational motion events using a cognitive perspective at the syntax-semantic interface. Typologically, the study views Chinese more as a verb-framed type language. However, we consider it more constructive to examine various syntactic and semantic factors collectively define the way a language works, instead of imposing static categorization on language. This dissertation is devoted to a dynamic description.