| Upon how to encode Path in motion event,Talmy classifies human languages into two types: Verb-framed Language(V-Language)in which Path is encoded by main verb and Satellite-framed Language(S-Language)in which Path is expressed by satellites.Later Slobin proposes the third type: Equipollently-framed Language(E-Language)in which both Manner and Path are represented by verbs of the same grammatical status.Previous studies generally classify English and German as S-Language and Chinese as S or E-language.However,three languages have many verbs encoding Path,so distribution and properties of these verbs need to be further analyzed to check current linguistic typology.In addition,scholars emphasize the specificity but ignore universality of sentence patterns encoding motion events.Efforts are made to summarize shared patterns in English,German and Chinese.Besides,due to imbalance of attention to stages of movement,there should be distribution of windows in cognition,which is worthy of further study.On the basis of Talmy's notion of windowing of attention and Langacker's notion of scanning,the thesis establishes an integrated framework,WS,within which semantic components and examples of 200 English,166 German and 137 Chinese single-word motion verbs selected from authoritative dictionaries are analyzed.Based on this,the proportion of verbs containing Path in each language is calculated,and distributions of windowing of Path are figured out in aspects of verbs types,event types and sentence patterns in three languages.From statistics,the thesis finds that much more lexicalization patterns encoding final window of motion event are produced than those for initial or medial ones.Cognitively,language reflects human's understanding of the world;therefore,the thesis thinks that generally three peoples pay more attention to the final stage of motion,that is to say,the result of event.Limitations of the thesis are also given for the future research. |
PDF Full Text Request