Study On Lexicalization Patterns Of Motion Events And Their Variability In Mandarin Chinese

A motion event refers to an event in which an entity moves and changes its location with respect to an object.Languages differ in the lexicalization patterns when describing motion events,which can be S(atellite)-framed,V(erb)-framed and E(quipollently)-framed.While most scholars support that S-framed patterns and Vframed patterns exist in Mandarin,the syntactic status of E-framed patterns is still controversial.One commonly accepted opinion is that Mandarin has two or three types of lexicalization patterns.On the other hand,researches on different motion types have different results,leading to different typologies of Mandarin.This thesis presents empirical research on motion events in Mandarin.Its goal is to provide evidence of the syntactic statuses of lexicalization patterns in Mandarin and to study their relationship with motion types,called pattern variability.In Experiment One,we used an eye-tracking paradigm to analyze the eye-tracking models of different expressions from 40 native speakers,focusing on the fixation times of the manner area and path area.The data from the manner area indicates that serial verb constructions differ syntactically from both S-and V-framed expressions,supporting an E-framed analysis of them.The data from the path area and Experiment Two explain the relationship between lexicalization patterns and motion types.The data from the path area shows that the semantic complexities of path components in different patterns are not the same,with E-and V-framed patterns both encoding boundary-crossing meaning,and S-framed patterns encoding non-boundary-crossing meaning.Experiment Two further supports this statement.With a production experiment on30 native speakers,we calculated the pattern variabilities for different motion types.It turned out that the variability of boundary-crossing motions is higher than that of nonboundary-crossing motions.In boundary-crossing motions,E-framed patterns are mainly used,with V-framed patterns in second place.In non-boundary-crossing motions,S-framed patterns are mainly used.The results imply the relevance between the lexicalization patterns of motion events and the event telicity.We attempt to discuss this linguistic phenomenon from the theoretical perspective of event structure and argue that Ramchand(2008)’s model can better explain it.In this model,verb semantics can contain a primitive of the telic semantics,which is consistent with the fact that E-framed patterns encode the boundary-crossing meaning through a verb.In summary,this thesis supports that on the one hand,Mandarin has S-framed,Vframed,and E-framed patterns,and on the other hand,motion types influence the use of lexicalization patterns,as shown by the variabilities,which also differ in different types of motions.In boundary-crossing motions,Mandarin exhibits characteristics of E-framed languages,while in non-boundary-crossing motions,it reflects the characteristics of S-framed languages.