Motion Expressions In Ancient And Modern Chinese:Co-occurrence Of Manner And Path

From the dichotomous typology of Talmy(1991、2000)to the tripartite method of Slobin(2004),and then to sub-event and sub-domain,the diversity of motion event lexicalization types in Chinese gradually emerges with the refinement of research.Along with this research mode,the dissertation takes the co-occurrence of Manner and Path in Chinese Self-Moving events as the starting point to redefine the concepts of M&P,and then makes a comparative survey of the ancient and modern pragmatic tendencies of different Path dimensions,different Manner domains and their co-occurrence types.The dissertation mainly draws the following three conclusions:First,the Path is the core of the movement event,which expresses the relative position relationship between Figure and Ground.Path and Trajectory should be distinguished:Trajectory is the description of the process,while Path emphasizes outcome.Therefore," guai(拐),zhuan(转),pdihuai(徘徊),and panxuan(盘旋)"are Locus verbs rather than Path verbs.Path of any dimension can co-exist with Manner,but the conformation and deictic cannot be lexicalized in the comprehensive vocabulary.In contrast between ancient and modern Chinese,Path verbs develop towards closure while path prepositions expand.In the recessive coding,the ancient Chinese often adopted the comprehensive vocabulary("ben(奔)[motion+manner+leave/go to]"),and the modern Chinese occasionally uses the frame coding("paowuli"跑屋里).Second,the Manner is the Co-event in a subordinate position,and depicts the process of movement;"Manner+Path" corresponds to "Process+ Result" in the meaning structure,in line with the chronological principle.After refining the concept domain,we find that the evolutionary tendencies between different concept domains are unequal.According to the semantic category,the manner verbs can be divided into three different types:ancient>modern,modern>ancient and the types only exist in Mandarin.The richness of verbs in modern Chinese is not as prominent as the previous general statistics:on the one hand,the high-frequency word "walking(走)"does not provide new information,but is more to meet the needs of the semantic mode of"Process+Result";On the other hand,the differentiation of some ancient synonyms is not necessary for modern life,so there is a situation of "ancient>modern".Third,the type differences of co-occurrence expression.From the perspective of Slobinian typology,Chinese is always a Path-salient language.The Path information is gradually being separated from comprehensive vocabulary while the manner of encoding is becoming purer.Driven by the development of disyllabification,both of them have been reanalyzed,and even the contradictory combination structure of "dengxia(登下)" can appear.From the perspective of Talmyan typology,Chinese shows a trend of evolution from Parallel-framed to S-framed,in which the Co-event of Accompany has changed from E-framed to S-framed,while the others have experienced a transformation from Synthetic to S-framed.It can be seen that,even in the same sub-domain,the encoding type will be different due to the difference in the manner domain.Syntactic elements such as "6r(而)"," yi(以)" and "zhe(着)","de(地)"play a decisive role in the transformation of types.In the end,this dissertation also mentions the influence of the style,and the direction to be further explored.