Non-motional uses of Tuī and Lā - 漢語他動動詞「推」與「拉」詞彙語意研究

Chapter 4 Findings

4.6 Non-motional uses of Tuī and Lā

As mentioned in Chapter 1, tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ may either posit the typical caused-motion senses of to push and to pull forming the caused-motion pattern of [NP1 V NP2 PP (VP)] or they may, as suggested by Chinese Wordnet, also posit other non-motional usages. Incorporating Chinese Wordnet together with corpus observations, it is found that tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ appear to bear several sense extensions. Tuī 推 ‘push’ appears to

Table 15: Various categories of Moved Entity in the events of Tuī and Lā

From table 15 and through the morphological make-ups in the previous section (table 14), it is revealed that tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ not only posit the prototypical caused-motion

22 This study only considered the non-motional usages of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ occurring in the transitive-like pattern [NP1 V NP2] because the majority of the extended senses of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull’ appear in this pattern with an exception of only one extended sense of lā 拉 ‘pull’ as in lā bù xià liǎn 拉 不下臉 ‘unable to pull down one’s face’ which involves a non-motional path appearing in the pattern of [NP1 V NP2 Coverb NP3]. As suggested by Chen (2012), this expression in Chinese is metonymic with the face representing the entire person and his/her social position which means that one is unable to raise or lower one’s social position relative to the addressee’s.

notions of pushing or pulling, but they can also extend to multiplex sense extensions from physical spatial domains to other non-spatial domains such as temporal domains or abstract domains which we will explain in chapter 5.

Chapter 5 Analysis

This chapter aims to present a frame-based analysis of Mandarin Push/Pull verbs tuī 推 and lā 拉 in order to account for the above concerns regarding the following issues: 1) the distinction between prototypical caused-motion verbs such as bān 搬 and yí移 which are equivalent to the English verb move with the comparision of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull;’ 2) the aspectual variations of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull;’ and 3) the metaphorical extensions of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull.’ Firstly, this chapter will provide a conceptual schema for the prototype of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ in section 5.1. Followed by section 5.2 with the distinction between bān 搬/yí移 ‘move’ and tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull.’ In section 5.3, the aspectual correlations of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ will be given. Section 5.4 provides the collocational constraints of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ with deictic lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go.’ In section 5.5, the detailed analysis of the metaphorical extensions of tuī 推 ‘push’

and lā 拉 ‘pull’ will be presented. Finally, in section 5.6, a frame-based analysis of caused-motion tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ will be given along with a summary of the overall analysis in section 5.7.

5.1 Conceptual Schema of the Prototype of Tuī and Lā

Based on Huang, Li and Li (2006), the human kind seems to have an innate ability for categorization; for instance, our brain divides the world into two primary types of entities:

things that exist and situations that take place. Moreover, according to Rosch (1978:36), prototypes can be defined as the ‘clearest cases of category membership defined operationally

by people’s judgments of goodness of membership in the category.’ Thus, a prototype of a category is then viewed as a salient exemplar of the overall categories. With the light of Prototype Theory, let’s move on to observe the prototype of Mandarin tuī推 ‘push’ and lā拉

‘pull.’

As mentioned in Chapter 4, the most frequently occurring syntactic pattern in the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ is the form [NP1 V NP2 PP (VP)] which fulfills the prototypical caused-motion construction proposed by Goldberg (1995) with the involvement of three arguments—Subject NP, Object NP, and Oblique PP. With further consideration of Li’s (2007) caused-motion concept where an Agent exerting an external force/cause and thus causing a translocational movement of the affected object (Theme/Patient), tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ also posit similar semantic properties. Syntactically, NP1 is the external argument of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ (the Subject of the main predicate), NP2 is the internal argument (the Direct Object), and PP is a directional phrase designating the path of motion.

Semantically, NP1 plays the role of an Agent, NP2 as the affected object which we called the

Moved Entity, and PP acts as the delimiting Endpoint of a Location as the following

examples illustrate (repeated from (16)):

(37) Caused-motion Pattern: NP1<V<NP2<Coverb{到/至/入/往/上/下/進/出/回/來/去}+NP3 (a) [我/Agent][氣憤地/Manner]推/拉[一輛腳踏車/Moved Entity][到屋裡/Location]。

wǒ qìfèndì tuī/lā yí-liàng jiǎo-tà-chē dào wūlǐ I ADJ push/pull one bicycle arrive home-in

‘I angrily pushed/pulled a bicycle into the house.’

(b) [我/Agent]推/拉[妹妹/Moved Entity][進房間/Location]。

wǒ tuī/lā mèimei jìn fángjiān

I push/pull sister enter room ‘I pushed/pulled my sister into the room.’

With the above thread of thinking, we can thus categorize tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’

as prototypical caused-motion verbs with the involvement of at least three major participant roles: Agent, Moved Entity, and Location constructed under the caused-motion construction of the form [NP1 V NP2 PP (Coverb+NP3)²³] with the conceptualization of someone exerting a certain driving force onto an affected object and thus causing a certain contact on the affected object to result at a certain destination. The conceptual schema of the prototype of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ can thus be presented in the following sections along with the involved syntactic patterns and core semantic components.

5.1.1 The Prototype of Tuī

As mentioned above, Mandarin tuī 推 ‘push’ can extend up to six sense-specific metaphorical extensions. Regarding to all the metaphorical extensions of tuī 推 ‘push,’ we propose that the most core sense of tuī 推 ‘push’ is equivalent to the English verb push. In the events of tuī 推 ‘push,’ three participants are usually involved within the conceptual basis:

a pushing entity playing the role of an Agent (Causer) and a pushed entity as a Moved Entity (Causee) that ended up at a pushed destination as Location (Goal). Moreover, according to FrameNet, the verb push is labeled under the Caused_Motion frame with the notion of an Agent causing a Theme (Moved Entity) to undergo translational motion whereby an Agent

23 As mentioned previously, in the syntactic form of [NP1 V NP2 PP (Coverb+Loc-NP)] the PPs in Chinese are usually expressed by non-predicate Path-verbs, which we called coverbs plus Loc-NPs as in wǒ tuī/lā yí liàng jiǎo tà chē dào wūlǐ 我推/拉一輛腳踏車到屋裡 ‘I pushed/pulled a bicycle into the house’ where dào 到

‘arrive’ acts as the coverb plus the Loc-NP of wūlǐ 屋裡 ‘the house.’

exerts force on someone or something (Moved Entity) in order to move them away from oneself (Agent) as already demonstrated in (37) above.

With this definition in mind, we can then conceptualize an image schema for the prototypical sense of Mandarin tuī 推 ‘push,’ which is therefore, a causal event that is undergone in a physical spatial domain:

Figure 11: The prototypical sense schema of Mandarin tuī

Location

²⁴

along a physical path through a period of time by means of asymmetrical

unidirectional energy transfer (shown by the dotted arrows). Specifically, the Agent, volitionally and directly, manipulates an INSTRUMENT ((e.g., hand(s)) although not always expressed) in order to exert force onto the Moved Entity so that it subsequently moves according to the direction it was being forced.

5.1.2 The Prototype of Lā

Lā 拉 ‘pull’ in Mandarin, as mentioned before, posits at least three sense-specific metaphorical extensions. With the three extended senses of lā 拉 ‘pull,’ we propose that the most prototypical sense is translated as pull in English. In the same vein of tuī 推 ‘push,’ lā 拉 ‘pull’ may also involve three participants: a pulling entity playing the role of an Agent (Causer) and a pulled entity as a Moved Entity (Causee) that ended up at a pulled destination as Location (Goal). According to FrameNet, the verb pull is labeled under the Caused_Motion frame with the notion of an Agent causing a Theme (Moved Entity) to undergo a translational motion whereby an Agent exerts force on someone or something (Moved Entity) in order to move them towards oneself (Agent) or away from the origin of the force as already demonstrated in (37) above.

Following the above notion, the conceptualized image schema for the prototypical sense of Mandarin lā 拉 ‘pull’ may be presented below which is also a causal event that is undergone in a physical spatial domain:

Figure 12: The prototypical sense schema of Mandarin lā

SYN: [NP1 拉 NP2 Coverb NP3]

SPATIAL

CAUSER/GOAL CAUSEE SOURCE

path path

force

Moved Entity Agent

Loc

In the above schema, the arrows signal the directionality of a causal movement whereby an Agent exerts a driving force onto a Moved Entity (shown by the bold arrow) causing the Moved Entity to undergo a locational change towards the Agent (shown by the dotted arrow) and moving away from its original source (Location). The Agent is thus conceptually conceived as the Goal and the Loc-NP as the original Source of the Moved Entity’s movement.

Specifically, the Agent, volitionally and directly manipulates an INSTRUMENT ((e.g., finger(s)) although not always expressed) in order to exert force onto the Moved Entity so that it subsequently moves toward the force-initiator (Agent)²⁵.

5.1.3 The Semantic and Syntactic Attributes of Prototype Tuī and Lā

Based on the above schemas along with the representative examples in (37), it is observed that the Agent (Causer) occurs in the subject position and is profiled as the primary prominent semantic element of an interactional causal event. The Agents (Causers) in (37) are core frame elements and are ususally animate human entities, thus indicating that they must occur volitionally in order to exert physical force onto another physical concrete entity to cause the Moved Entity to move towards or away from the Agent.

The Moved Entity is profiled as the second prominent semantic role in a causal event, occupying as the direct object position and acting as the affected object. Moved Entities are usually physical concrete objects that are able to undergo a locational change. These direct objects play the role of a Manipulated_Moved Entity,²⁶ since it undergoes an exertion from the force initiator (Agent) who causes locational changes of the Moved Entity over a certain

25 Note that the Agent’s body parts (e.g., hand(s)), in the causal events of lā 拉 ‘pull,’ function as an INSTRUMENT for grasping and pulling the Moved Entity.

26 The term “Manipulation” is adopted from FrameNet in the sense that Agents occurring in this frame causes or influences the Moved Entity through some kind of force exertion.

period of time.

The Location is the third semantic role in the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’

occupying the PP position and acts as the Goal of the Moved Entity’s movement for tuī 推

‘push’ and as the Source of the Moved Entity’s movement for lā 拉 ‘pull.’ The Location in a prototypical caused-motion event would typically take a spatial destination/location such as dào wūlǐ (37a) and jìn fángjiān (37b).

5.2 Tuī and Lā versus Bān and Yí

As mentioned above, Mandarin Push/Pull verbs tuī 推 and lā 拉, as verbs pertaining to caused-motion, do posit the semantic and syntactic properties of a typical caused-motion verb, that is, an Agent causing a Moved Entity to move towards or away from oneself (Agent) under the syntactic form of [NP1 V NP2 PP (Coverb+NP3)]. However, if the events are so similar to each other, how can we distinguish between the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull’ with those of prototypical caused-motion verbs such as bān 搬/yí 移 ‘move’ as illustrated in the contrastive pairs below:

(38) (a) Proto-caused-motion events:

[我/Agent]_NP1[搬/移]_V[一箱蘋果/Moved Entity]_NP2[到/_Coverb+屋裡/_Location]_PP。 wǒ bān/yí yì-xiāng píngguǒ dào wūlǐ

I move one-box apple arrive house-inside

‘I moved a box of apples into the house.’

(b) Events of tuī and lā:

[我/Agent]NP1 [推/拉]V [一輛腳踏車/Moved Entity]NP2 [到/Coverb+屋裡/Location]PP。

wǒ tuī/lā yí-liàng jiǎotàchē dào wū-lǐ I push/pull one bicycle arrive house-inside

‘I pushed/pulled a bicycle into the house.’

As observed in (38), both the prototypical caused-motion events (38a) and the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ (38b) posit similar syntactic pattern of [NP1 V NP2 PP (Coverb+NP3)] with the semantic components of Agent, Moved Entity, and Location. In order to distinguish between the two causal events, we adopted Li’s (2007) analysis of caused-motion event.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, Li (2007) defines that a typical caused-motion event consists of a series of subevents: the causing event and the motion event, where the two entities or subevents have a causal relation with one causing the other to undergo a translocational change, that is, the motion is initiated and controlled by an external causer. Based on Li’s analysis, we propose that the verbs in a prototypical caused-motion construction, that is, caused-motion verbs such as bān 搬/yí 移 ‘move’ (38a) typically profiles the motion event which focuses on the physical translocation of the Moved Entity as in yì-xiāng píngguǒ dào wū-lǐ 一箱蘋果到屋裡 ‘the box of apples into the house.’ Whereas in the events of tuī 推

‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull,’ the verbs can either profile the causing event that is, the force interaction between the Agent and the Moved Entity as in wǒ tuī/lā yí-liàng jiǎotàchē 我推/拉 一輛腳踏車 ‘I pushed/pulled a bicycle’ or the motion event, that is, the translocation of the Moved Entity as in yí-liàng jiǎotàchē dào wū-lǐ 一輛腳踏車到屋裡 ‘a bicycle into the house.’ The contrastive pairs may be illustrated in the following image schemas with figure 13 presenting the prototypical caused-motion events and figure 14, the events of tuī 推 ‘push’

and lā 拉 ‘pull.’

Figure 13: The prototypical caused-motion conceptual schema

Figure 14: The prototypical causal event of Tuī and Lā

In view of the above schemas, it is observed that the majority of the instances of prototypical caused-motion verbs such as bān 搬/yí 移 ‘move’ emphasize more on the motion event with a high percentage of 98%. Whereas in the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull,’ it is not so restricted, since it can either focus on the causing event (tuī 45% and lā 37%) or the motion event (tuī 59% and lā 63%). The contrastive pairs are once again demonstrated below with their profiled events.

Figure 15: The profiled event of prototypical caused-motion verb

(40) Causal events of tuī and lā:

(a) [我/Agent]NP1 [推/拉]V [一輛腳踏車/Moved Entity]NP2 [到/Coverb+屋裡/Location]PP。 wǒ tuī/lā yí-liàng jiǎotàchē dào wū-lǐ

I push/pull one-bicycle arrive house-inside ‘I pushed/pulled a bicycle into the house.’

(b) [小蜜/_Agent]，不要[推/拉]_V[牠/_Moved_Entity]。

ｘiǎo mì bùyào tuī/lā tā

Little honey no push/pull him

‘Little honey, don’t push/pull him.’

Figure 16: The profiled events of tuī and lā

With the above distributional percentages of the profiled events along with the representation of image schemas, it thus revealed that the distinction between a prototypical caused-motion verb such as bān 搬/yí 移 ‘move’ from those of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’

is that the former profiles a physical goal which focuses on where the Moved Entity ends up at after a motional act, while in the latter; the goal could be unspecified for it stresses more on the intimate force interaction between the Agent and the Moved Entity. That is to say, when

motion event

一箱蘋果到屋裡我搬/移

causing event

motion event

我推/拉

小蜜推/拉牠

一輛腳踏車到屋裡

bān 搬 or yí 移 ‘move’ occurs with a Moved Entity, the Moved Entity MUST be moved from point A to point B; however, when tuī 推 ‘push’ or lā 拉 ‘pull’ occurs with a Moved Entity, the Moved Entity does not necessarily need to be moved as illustrated in the following constrastive pairs:

(41) (a) *我搬/移椅子，但它沒有動。

wǒ bān/yí yǐzi dàn tā méi yǒu dòng I move chair but it no move ‘*I moved the chair but it didn’t move.’

(b) 我推/拉他，但他沒有動。

wǒ tuī lā tā dàn tā méi yǒu dòng I push/pull he but he no move ‘I pushed/pulled him but he didn’t move.’

5.3 Tuī and Lā with Aspectual Zhe

Other from positing similar semantic and syntactic properties of a caused-motion verb, we also discovered that, based on corpus distribution, the majority of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull’ frequently collocate with aspectual marker zhe 著 as already shown in the distributional frequency above (table 12). The examples are repeated below from example (36) for reference:

(42) [V + ASP]

(a) 他推著輪椅進學校上課，

tā tuī zhe lúnyǐ jìn xuéxiào shàngkè he push ASP wheelchair enter school class

‘He pushed the wheelchair into school for classes.’

(b) 他們會拉著你到一個人少的角落，

tāmen huì lā zhe nǐ dào yī-gè rén shǎo de jiǎoluò they will pull ASP you arrive one people few DE corner ‘They will pull you to a corner where less people are around.’

mǔqīn tuī zhe xiǎohái cānguān měishùguǎn mother push ASP child visit museum ‘Mother pushed the child to visit the museum.’

(d) 王叔叔拉著母親一起合照，

ｗáng shūshu lā zhe mǔqīn yīqǐ hézhào Wang uncle pull ASP mom together take-picture ‘Uncle Wang pulled mom to take a picture together.’

In order to distinguish between the usages of the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’

with the occurrence of aspectual marker zhe 著 and those without, we incorporated Li’s (2007) analysis on caused-motion events together with Talmy’s (2007) analysis on the relation of co-event conflations.

Talmy (2000) once distinguished motion-with-manner and motion-with-cause which thus revealed that the translational motion event can be divided into two groups: self-motion event with the semantic components of [Move+Manner] and [Move+Cause] for the caused-motion

events. Based on Talmy (2000), tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ are said to be motion verbs that are further conflated with the co-event components of [Move+Cause] as illustrated below:

(43) [Move+Cause]

我推/拉一輛腳踏車到屋裡。

wǒ tuī/lā yí-liàng jiǎo-tà-chē dào wūlǐ I push/pull one bicycle arrive house

‘I pushed/pulled a bicycle into the house.’

With further incorporation of Li’s (2007) caused-motion events, tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull,’ as verbs pertaining to caused-motion, involves two subevents—causing event and motion event—where the former and the latter are causally related to each other as shown in the following figure:

Figure 17: The profiled events of tuī and lā

Based on the two incorporated approaches above, the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉

‘pull,’ as prototypical caused-motion verbs, typically profiles more on the causing event. That is, the force interaction between the Agent and the Moved Entity which stresses on the way how the Moved Entity is being caused by the external force-initiator (Agent) as illustrated in the schema below along with representative examples:

Motion event Causing event

我推/拉一輛腳踏車我推/拉一輛腳

一輛腳踏車到屋裡一輛

Figure 18: The image schema of [V+Ø ]

(44) (a) 清潔女工出手推死者，

However, when the causing event of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ is transformed to just demonstrating a kind of Manner, there is ususally a motion event added as observed from examples (42 a-d) along with the distributional patterns in table 12. Under circumstances of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ plus aspectual marker zhe 著, a destinational goal/endpoint (PP) or a purposful act (VP)²⁷ is frequently involved.

Based on Talmy’s (2000) analysis of co-event relations, as mentioned above, we can thus view the occurrence of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ plus aspectual marker zhe 著, that is

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