A Contrastive Study Of Sentence Patterns And Syntactic Structures Of Motion Events In English And Chinese

This thesis is a contrastive study of sentence patterns and syntactic structures in English and Chinese motion events, which is based on Talmy’s binary classification of motion events. What’s more, it focuses on explaining the common and specific features of manner components and path components in Chinese and English motion events by making a contrastive analysis of their sentence patterns and syntactic structures. Motion event that can be described as an event of physical motion or a stationary state is central to human experience and moves around us. It is well-known that different languages have different ways of expressing motion events. In accordance with Talmy’s theory (1985,2000), languages can be divided into verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. Verb-framed languages express the information of paths in the main verbs whereas satellite-framed languages adopt satellites (here they refer to verb-particles in English and directional complements in Chinese.) and the manner/cause components are expressed by verbs. In his research, Talmy (1985,2000) classifies Chinese as a satellite-framed language on the basis of path component which is expressed by satellite instead of verb based on his theory. His classification encourages many scholars to make a further study on various languages in the world, and these scholars have different opinions on Chinese classification. Slobin (2004) proposes a third possibility with equipollently-framed language, that is, manner and path are expressed by the equivalent grammatical forms. He (2004) claims that Chinese belongs to the category of equipollently-framed languages with the evidence that Chinese is a serial-verb construction language which includes multiple verbs. By far, Chinese typological study hasn’t reached a clear conclusion because there are large numbers of complement phrases used as verbs in Chinese motion events. Therefore, this study concerned with classifying the classification of Chinese by investigating sentence patterns and syntactic structures of the two languages. What’s more, the contrastive analysis finds out that Chinese is not a typical example of satellite-framed pattern. On the contrary, it shows the characteristics of verb-framed pattern. That is to say, the "path" component is expressed by verbs while the "manner" component is expressed by adverbials and other components. This thesis focuses on four parts as following: (1) It tries to analysis the sentence patterns of English and Chinese motion events;(2) It attempts to explode the similarities and differences of path components between the two languages with the aids of the comparative analysis of path verbs, path prepositions and path satellites;(3) Chinese seems be classified as a verb-framed language, an equipollently-framed language on the ground that a large number of resultative constructions appear in Chinese motion events. However, it is still appropriate to classify Chinese as satellite-framed language.(4) It also attempts to summarize the similarities and differences of manner components in the two languages by comparing the manner verbs and manner adverbs in English and Chinese motion events.In the end, we can conclude that Chinese should fall into satellite-framed languages in the expression of path and manner components. But we usually put the grammatical positions of main verbs in the manner verbs and path verbs or in another situation that only path verbs appear in the position of predicates in the sentence. In contrast to manner verbs, path verbs are more salience in the semantics. Thus we consider Chinese as a satellite-framed language with the characteristics of verb-framed patterns. There are few researches about motion events, let alone the contrastive study about their sentence patterns and syntactic structures. Furthermore, most cross-language studies focus on the lexicalization patterns or the conceptual representation. The study of sentence patterns and syntactic analysis attempts to make a contrastive study of motion events from an innovative perspective and aims at providing a new perspective for the linguistic typology of Chinese.