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，

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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.’

(c) 母親推著小孩參觀美術館，

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

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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

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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.

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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 [V+ASP], as demonstrating a kind of motion-with-manner since, based on Yip &

Rammington (2004), V+著 denotes a durative state that signals a certain ‘manner of existence,’ ‘manner of movement,’ or ‘accompanying manner’ as shown in the schema below:

Figure 19: The image schema of [V+ZHE]

Under such special circumstances when the causing event of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ is just demonstrating a kind of Manner, it will emphasize on the durative state of a motion event, which at the same time, based on Yip & Rammington (2004), brings out the implicature that the Agent moves along with the Moved Entity. Thus, under [V+ZHE], the Agent role becomes Agent_Mover since it signals a kind of co-movement.

In sum, from the above analysis, it is noted that under the circumstances of [V+Ø ], the causal events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ profiles more on the cause of the event which brings out that the event signals a prototypical caused-motion event. Whereas, under cases of [V+ASP], it demonstrates a non-prototypical caused-motion event for it only demonstrates a kind of Manner which stresses on the durative state of a motion event. From here we can observe that the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ can be transformed from a prototypical caused-motion event to an event that only profiles the manner-of-motion.

pattern ([NP1 V NP2 PP (VP)]) and 2) serial verb construction ([NP1 V NP2 VP]), where Moved Entities are being translocated to a certain goal/endpoint to do a certain purposeful act.

tuī

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