Which way to move: The evolution of motion expressions in Chinese

Abstract

This paper re-examines from an evolutionary perspective the typological status of Chinese, with regard to the issue of how the information of motion events is encoded (Talmy 2000;Slobin 2004). We investigate, with emphasis on the roles of both language structure and language use, the four periods of Chinese (Old, Middle, Pre-Modern and Modern) in terms of parameters such as path, manner and ground, and compare with typologically different languages, namely, verb-framed languages like Spanish and satellite-framed languages like English. Our statistical study shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language, and Pre-Modern Chinese is a stepped-up period with respect to the speed of evolution; (ii) Modern Chinese adopts diverse patterns to encode motion events, which are different from both typical verb-framed languages and typical satellite-framed languages. We thus conclude that (i) contrary to Peyraube's (2006) claim, the typological shift in Chinese has not yet been achieved; (ii) there is little justification for classifying Chinese as an equipollently framed language as in Slobin (2004) and Chen and Guo (2009). Therefore, there is no need to posit an equipollent type for Chinese; and (iii) Modern Chinese is in a transitional state from a V-type to an S-type due to the evolution of its motion expressions. It also favors the S-type in both its morphosyntactic properties and language use.

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

“…Chinese evolved over time from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language. Like English, Modern Chinese encodes path onto nonverb satellites (Hohenstein et al 2006, Shi & Wu 2014.…”

“…In these frames, path is encoded onto non-verbal satellites in the sentence, while manner may be encoded onto the main verb. Chinese (2) and English ( 3) are examples of languages that have a satellite-framed structure, along with some Indo-European languages (Schröder 2016, Shi & Wu 2014, Slobin 2004, Talmy 2003.…”

Going places in Dutch and mandarin Chinese: conceptualising the path of motion cross-linguistically

“…Based on the observations discussed above, we adopt the view in Ji et al (2011) that this language is of a mixed type, containing features of satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages (see similar views in Beavers et al, 2010;Ji & Hohenstein, 2017; see also Shi & Wu, 2014, claiming that historically Chinese was a typical verb-framed language which is now in the process of transforming into a satellite-framed language).…”

The Lexicalization Patterns of Old Chinese Motion Verbs and the Manner/ Result Complementarity

“…Concerning language use, Old Chinese is observed to have a larger path lexicon and path verbs are also used more frequently than manner verbs. Shi and Wu [10] in their study of six Old Chinese texts point out an obvious asymmetry towards path verbal constructions. The percentage of pure manner verbal constructions is about 11.17% of all motion constructions, but the percentage of pure path verbal constructions is about 74.53%.…”