Tuī and Lā co-occurring with Lái and Qù

Based on the deictic distributional frequencies from corpus observations, there are two typical syntactic patterns that motional tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ co-occur with Deictic lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go:’ 1) [V+NP+Deictic] which corresponds to our caused-motion pattern [NP1+NP2+Deictic+NP3] and 2) [V+Deictic] which corresponds to our transitive-like pattern [NP1+V+Deictic+NP2] as illustrated in the following table:

Semantic Roles Semantic Features

Tuī Lā

Agent

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Table 11: The Distributional Frequency of Motional tuī and lā with Deictic lái and qù

By considering the above table, it is vividly shown that the pattern [V+NP+Deictic+(NP3/VP)]

occurs most frequently with a total of 81% and 82% respectively. Out of the above patterns, serial verb construction has the highest frequency of instances in the form of [NP1+V+NP2+Deictic+VP] with a total of 49% for tuī 推‘push’and 53% for lā 拉 ‘pull,’

while the typical caused-motion construction has the second highest frequency in the form of [NP1+V+NP2+Deictic+NP3+(VP)] as illustrated in the following examples:

(29) [V+NP+Deictic]

(a) 我[推/拉]V[父親]NP [來/去]DEICTIC紀念堂。

wǒ tuī/lā fùqīn lái/qù jìniàntang I push/pull father come/go memorial hall

‘I pushed/pulled my dad to go/come to the memorial hall.’

(b) 他也會[推/拉]V [祖母]NP [來/去]DEICTIC投票。

tā yě huì tuī/lā zǔmǔ lái/qù tóupiào He also will push/pull grandma come/go vote

‘He will also pushed/pulled his grandma to go to vote.’

Types Patterns Tuī Lā

Count Frequency Total Count Frequency Total Caused-motion NP1>V>NP2>來/去<NP3 96/300 32%

81%

87/300 29%

Serial Verb NP1>V>NP2>來/去<VP 146/300 49% 158/300 53% 82%

Transitive NP1>V+來>NP2

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By observing the above examples of the pattern [V+NP+Deictic], it is noted that both lái 來

‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ can be interchangeable where the choice of lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去

‘go’ would be greatly depended on the perspective of the speaker (Liu 2013).¹⁹ However, there are other cases, as in our third transitive-like pattern [V+Deictic] having the form of [NP1+V+Deictic+NP2] where lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ in this case, based on corpus observations, are no longer interchangeable as the following examples demonstrate:

(30) [V+Deictic]

(a) 民眾[推/拉]V [來]DEICTIC一車垃圾包，

mínzhòng tuī/lā lái yī chē lèsèbāo people push/pull come one car trash bag

‘People pushed/pulled over a pile of trash bags.’

(b) *民眾[推/拉]_V [去] _DEICTIC一車垃圾包。

mín-zhòng tuī/lā qù yì-chē lèsèbāo people push/pull go one car trash bag

*‘People pushed/pulled go a pile of trash bags.’

(c) 工作人員[推/拉]V[來]DEICTIC滿滿一車廂花生，

gōngzuò rényuán tuī/lā lái mǎnmǎn yī chēxiāng huāshēng, work staff push/pull come full one-car peanuts ‘The staff members pushed/pulled over a car full of peanuts.’

19 Note that the position of Deictic could be either before or after the Loc-NP, e.g., huí qù xuéxiào 回去學校 vs. huí xuéxiào qù 回學校去‘go back to school.’

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(d) *工作人員[推/拉]V[去] DEICTIC滿滿一車廂花生，

gōngzuò rényuán tuī/lā qù mǎnmǎn yī chēxiāng huāshēng work staff push/pull go full one-car peanuts *‘The staff members pushed/pulled go a car full of peanuts.’

Regarding the above examples of the pattern [V+Deictic] where lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去

‘go’ immediately follow the main predicate, it is noted that lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ in this case are more restricted in their usages, since they are no longer interchangeable. By considering the above contrastive pairs (30a and b) and (30c and d) once again, it is worth-nothing that only lái 來 ‘come’ is acceptable; however, if qù 去 ‘go’ is to be applied onto such pattern of [V+Deictic], a clear and specific destinational goal must be present to play the role of a path-delimiting Endpoint and thus forming the pattern [V+Deictic+GOAL]

as the following examples illustrate:

(31) [V+Deictic+GOAL]

(a) 民眾[推/拉]_V [去] _DEICTIC一車垃圾包到[垃圾場]_GOAL。 mín-zhòng tuī/lā qù yì-chē lèsèbāo dào lèsèchǎng people push/pull go one car trash bag arrive wasteyard

‘People pushed/pulled a pile of trash bags to the wasteyard.’

(b) 工作人員[推/拉]V[去] DEICTIC滿滿一車廂花生到[市場]GOAL，

gōngzuò rényuán tuī/lā qù mǎnmǎn yī chēxiāng huāshēng dào shìchǎng work staff push/pull go full one-car peanuts arrive market ‘The staff members pushed/pulled a car full of peanuts to the market.’

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With the comparison of the above example sets where a deictic is immediately followed by a main predicate ([V+Deictic]) (30) and the same as 30, but with an additional goal NP ([V+Deictic+Goal]) (31), we can vividly observe that under the circumstances of [V+Deictic], only lái 來 is acceptable; however, if a clear and specific destinational goal NP followed by an Endpoint marking verb such as dào 到 ‘arrive’ is added to the deictic forming [V+Deictic+Goal], then qù 去 ‘go’ can be applied and thus become grammatical since it has a clear and specific destinational goal acting as a path-delimiter for Endpoint reference²⁰.

What about [V+zǒu] which, like [V+qù], involves ‘movement away from an original location’ and has the same syntactic pattern as [推/拉+V]. However, why is it necessary to add a path-delimiting Endpoint for [V+qù], while [V+zǒu] is acceptable without a path, as illustrated in the following examples:

(32) [Tuī/Lā+ zǒu]²¹

(a) 工務單位出動推土機[V推V走]巨石。

gōngwù dānwèi chūdòng tuītǔjī tuī zǒu jùshí service unit set-out bulldozer push go huge-stone

‘The service unit set out bullozers to push away huge stones.’

(b) 每天都有南方來的客商[V拉V走]十幾車土豆，

měitiān dū yǒu nánfāng lái de kèshāng lā zǒu shí jǐ chē tǔdòu everyday all have southern come POSS merchants pull go ten more car potato ‘Southern merchants come everyday to pull away more than a dozen cars if potatoes.’

20 According to Liu et al (2013), Deictic may serve as a locational reference, which is probably why a Deictic may alternate with a Loc-NP in marking the delimiting point of motion.

21 There are a very few number of instances for V+zǒu+NP. In Sinica there are zero occurrences of tuī/lā+zǒu+NP. In Gigaword, there are 5 instances of tuī+zǒu+NP and 10 instances for lā+zǒu+NP.

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A preliminary assumption is that zǒu 走 ‘go’ specifies a movement away from an original location and the sense of away inherently signals a path away from the mover; however, as for Deictic qù 去 ‘go,’ which is only a speaker-oriented deictic marker, requires a path-delimiter as its Endpoint to complete the whole motion event, since it is ungrammatical when no goal or path-delimiter is present.