Tuī and Lā with Deictic Lái and Qù

As mentioned above, the events of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ not only profile a typical caused-motion event, but they also posit intimate deictic relations between the Agent and the Moved Entity with an emphasis on the force interaction between the two entities as illustrated below (repeated below from (29) above):

(45) [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.’

By observing (45) above with the pattern of [V+NP+Deictic], it is noted that both lái 來

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

would be greatly depended on the perspective of the speaker (Liu 2013).²⁸ However, there are other cases where a deictic is immediately followed by the main predicate forming [V+Deictic]. In this case, lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ are no longer interchangeable as the

28 As mentioned before, 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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examples below illustrate (repeated from (30) above):

(46) [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.’

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.’

By considering the above contrastive pairs ((46a-b) and (46c-d)) once again, as observed above, only lái 來 ‘come’ is acceptable under circumstances where the deictic is immediately followed by the main predicate; however, qù 去 ‘go’ in this case would be totally

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unacceptable. Why is this the case and how can we deal with such collocational constraints?

A possible explanation for the cases where tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ are immediately followed by a deictic lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ forming [V+Deictic] is that we should flashback to the core sense of tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ as caused-motion verbs. As noted above, we mentioned that tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ focus on the direction of movement, which means that the action will take a certain direction to reach a certain Endpoint.

Along the vein, under circumstances of [V+Deictic], only lái 來 ‘come’ is acceptable, since lái 來 ‘come’ basically implicates movement towards speaker, which at the same time, fulfils the requirements of the whole motion event where the Moved Entity usually moves to a certain Endpoint. Therefore, under such examples of (46a) and (46c), the sentences are grammatical since the SPEAKER had taken over the role of the GOAL. That is to say, being verbs of directed movements where actions usually take a certain direction and a certain path, tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull’ plus lái 來 ‘come’ present a clear and specific Endpoint where the speaker takes over the role of the Goal acting as a path-delimiter as demonstrated in the schema below:

Figure 20: Speaker as Goal ([V+Lái])

As for [V+Qù], it becomes unacceptable because qù 去 ‘go’ basically implicates movement away from speaker; however, it did not indicate where the Moved Entity moves to or end up at and the Endpoint is being unspecified. That is to say, as verbs pertaining to directed movements, there must be a path; however, for qù 去 ‘go,’ we observe that there’s a path, but the path does not have a path-delimiter, thus making the sentences in (46b) and (46d)

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unacceptable. The schema below thus illustrates the unclear path-delimiting Endpoint where we use a ‘question mark’ to represent the untakened Goal position.

Figure 21: Goal = unclear ([V+Qù])

However, as mentioned above, if and when qù 去 ‘go’ is to be applied under the pattern of [V+Deictic], there must be a clear and specific destinational goal acting as its path-delimiting Endpoint, thus, forming the pattern of [V+Deictic+GOAL] as the following examples illustrate:

(47) [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.’

lā path

tuī

Eg: *民眾 推/拉+去 一車垃圾包

Entity

Agent Loc

? SPEAKER

GOAL

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With the comparison of the above example sets where a deictic is immediately followed by a main predicate forming [V+Deictic] (46) and where a deictic is also immediately followed by a main predicate, but with an additional goal NP forming [V+Deictic+Goal] (47), we can vividly observe that under the circumstances of [V+Deictic], only lái 來 ‘come’ is acceptable. However, if a clear and specific destinational goal acting as path-delimiting Endpoint is added to the deictic forming [V+Deictic+Goal], then qù 去‘go’ can be applied and thus become grammatical as the schema below demonstrates:

Figure 22: Destination as Goal ([V+Qù+Goal])

By observing figure 22 as compared to figure 21, it is shown that the role of the Goal position in figure 22 has been occupied by a clear and specific spatial destinational Goal acting as a path-delimiting Endpoint, that is lèsè chǎng 垃圾場 ‘waste yard’ in this case which is being marked by an Endpoint marker dào 到 ‘arrive.’ Therefore, the examples in (47) are grammatical since adding on a Goal means having a clear and specific path-delimiting Endpoint.

Moreover, as mentioned above, based on corpus observations, there are other cases such as [V+Zǒu], which is similar to [V+Qù], for it also posits the meaning of ‘movement away from an original location’ and occur in the same syntactic pattern of [V(tuī/lā 推/拉

‘push/pull’) +V(qù 去/zǒu 走 ‘go’)]. However, they behave differently in that under [V+Qù], a path-delimiter is needed to act as its Endpoint reference, while [V+Zǒu] is acceptable without a path, as illustrated in the following examples:

lā

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(48) [Tuī/Lā+ zǒu]

(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 dōu 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.’

Based on corpus observations, zǒu 走 ‘go’ is found to be immediately followed by the main predicate tuī 推 ‘push’ and lā 拉 ‘pull.’ Following our analysis, [tuī/lā 推/拉 ‘push/pull’ + zǒu 走 ‘go’] is acceptable because zǒu 走 ‘go’ lexically specifies the movement of an entity away from its original location, where the sense of ‘away’ is already implied verb-internally.

However, as for the Deictic qù 去 ‘go,’ as mentioned before, is only a speaker-oriented deictic marker; therefore, it requires the presence of a path-delimiter as its Endpoint to complete the whole motion event since it is ungrammatical when no goal or path-delimiter is present.