Research On Linguistic Representation And Asymmetry Of Voluntary Motion Event In Chinese Mandarin

This thesis probes into the linguistic representation and asymmetry of voluntary motion event in Chinese Mandarin,based on native speakers' description data elicited by the dynamic visual tool Trajectoire and corpus data from two Chinese novels.The thesis focuses on the linguistic representation of Source,Median and Goal in different voluntary motion event and further examines the asymmetry from the perspective of information selection,lexical and grammatical devices,encoding strategies,semantic granularity,syntactic position and distribution of semantic components.In this thesis,the linguistic representation and asymmetry of voluntary motion event are studied in the domain of the boundary-crossing event,non-boundary-crossing event and complex event that implies two(or more)Grounds.In terms of the information selection,we firstly investigate in which part of Path,Source,Median or Goal,Chinese native speakers tend to allocate more attention to,when they describing the three different kinds of motion events.Secondly,we summarize the grammatical resources available in Mandarin to express the Source,Median or Goal in boundary-crossing event and non-boundary-crossing event,given both explicit lexical and grammatical marking as well as zero marking device,by which path information can be inferred from the context.We differentiate the semantic granularities of these resources and their syntactic positions so as to further explore the asymmetry among Source,Median and Goal.Finally,based on the Event Construction Typology and the implicational scalar proposed by Croft et al.(2010),we discuss the encoding strategies of boundary-crossing motion event that includes INTO,ACROSS and OUT event in Chinese Mandarin,and the syntactic distribution of semantic components in these events.The findings of this thesis are as follows: there are a variety of devices applied to express motion events in Chinese Mandarin,including lexical,constructional,syntactic and pragmatic device,demonstrating certain asymmetry when describing different parts of Path.In terms of the information selection,Chinese native speakersencode different parts of Path when identifying different kinds of motion event clips,but there exists a selection preference scale “Median <Source < Goal(the right part of scale is more likely to encode than the left part)”,showing a bias towards Goal.The asymmetry among the Source,Median and Goal is also observed on grammatical devices,semantic granularity and syntactic positions,all showing a bias towards Goal.To be specific,there are more and fine-grained grammatical devices to express the end part of motion than the initial or the median part.Syntactically,in the domain of cross-boundary motion event,the Goal phrases often occupy the object position of verb,while the Source or Median phrases often occupy the object position of preposition,which means goal phase is more syntactically significant.Our online description data show that there are some differences in terms of the encoding strategies of the three boundary-crossing events,i.e.INTO/ACROSS/OUT event,but the differences are not statistically significant.Chinese Mandarin tends to use highly integrated morphosyntactic structures,i.e.satellite-framed structure,to encode the three boundary-crossing events,but less integrated verb-framed construction,serial verb construction and coordination also exist.Our corpus data also support this conclusion,but we find out there are some differences of encoding strategies within different novels,which means narrative style of novel may affect our judgment of coding strategy.In terms of the semantic density,Mandarin is a language with high information density,which generally packages the Manner and Path information into one integrated clause,this trend of syntactic distribution of semantic components aligns with the satellite-framed structure.