Motion encoding typology of Mandarin

The typology classification of Mandarin has been a dispute over the years.

Talmy (1991) classified Mandarin as an S-language. S-languages is said to encode

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Path in a satellite position in a sentence. He argued that Path verbs did not usually function as full verbs and that Path verb type was rather limited. Therefore, he believed that, in Mandatrin, the second verb (usually a Path component) of the motion serial verb was generally viewed as the satellite part of the serial verb, so Manner was the more significant component. Such argument was supported by scholars such as Chao (1968) and Li and Thompson (1989), who also regarded the second verb “Path” as a complement to the first verb “Manner”. However, later Tai (2003) proposed that the second verb (Path) was the center of predication, or the head of the serial verb construction. He argued that because the second verb referred to the foreground information, it should be considered more important than the first verb (Manner) of the serial verb. This means that Mandarin should be considered a V-language, since V-languages encode Motion mainly in Path verbs. The argument of which segment takes the primary position has long been discussed until Slobin (2004) proposed an alternate view on Mandarin’s categorization. He believed that Mandarin belonged to the third type — equipollently-framed languages. He believed that V1 (Manner) and V2 (Path) were equally important in its morphosyntactic status, because it was very natural for the Mandarin speakers to express Motion with either Path or Manner verbs, and they appeared “to be equal in force or significance” (Slobin, 2004). Chen (2005) and Guo and Chen (2009) supported this view by examining Mandarin speakers’ use of motion verb type and the encoding of Ground information. They found that the rhetorical style behaved not so much like V-languages nor S-V-languages. Therefore, they believed that Mandarin indeed belonged to another type — the equipollently-framed language.

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In Mandarin, Path, Manner and Deixis are all allowed to be coded individually or jointly in a serial verb (such as: ⾶飛上 fei shan, “fly up”; 跑出來 pau guo lai, “run out over”). Path verb is coded simultaneous with the semantic element of Motion and Path. Furthermore, Path can appear alone (e.g. 進 jing “enter”), or be combined with other Path, Manner or Deictic verbs. When it appears in a serial verb, it may occupy the first slot of the verb (e.g. 進來 jing lai “come in”). But most of the time, it occupies the second slot of the serial verb (e.g. 跑進 pao jing “run in”). Manner verb, naturally, is encoded with the semantic element of Manner and Motion. Manner verb is one of the principle linguistic devices for expressing Manner of motion events in Mandarin (Chen, 2005). Like Path verbs, Manner verbs can be used individually (e.g.

跑 pao “run”). When it is used jointly with Path or/and Deixis, it always stays in the

first slot of the verb (e.g. 跑掉 pao diao “run away”; 跑出來 pao chu lai “run out”).

Deixis verbs indicate whether the Figure moves away or toward the speaker. There are two kinds of Deixis in Mandarin: 來 lai “come” and 去 qu “go”. Deixis can either be used alone, or combined with Path or Manner in the final slot of the serial verb (e.g. 跑來 pao lai “run near”; 跑出來 pao chu lai “run out toward”). One of the language-specific characteristics of Mandarin was that Manner, Path and Deixis verbs could occur simultaneously in a serial order to form serial verb (Chen, 2005).

Naturally, the three categories of the motion verbs can generate several combinations of different constructions. However, among all the constructions, Manner + Path

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(+Deixis) was the most common construction found in Mandarin speakers’ motion encoding (Chen, 2005; Guo & Chen, 2009).

Apart from encoding simultaneously Manner and Path (including Deixis) into a construction of serial verb, there are some other language-specific features of Mandarin in coding motion events mentioned by scholars such as Chen (2005). Chen discussed adults’ motion encoding in the aspects of motion verb token, motion verb type, Ground description, motion segment across sentences, and static settings versus dynamic movement. According to his study, in verb type usage, Mandarin speakers used a lot more types of Manner verbs (including transitive and intransitive ones) than Path verbs (45 vs. 16). As for verb token usage, Manner frequency is a lot higher than that of only Path (65% vs. 26%). As for Ground information, 52% of their motion expressions were found with at least one type of ground information.

Furthermore, the Mandarin speaking adults used 3.5 event segments on average in the deer scene. Last, the speakers tended to describe more physical settings than dynamic movement.

In sum, there are several features in Mandarin’s motion encoding: 1) Construction: Manner+Path (+Deixis) can all be coded into a serial verb, and are the most common motion construction. 2) Verb type: Manner lexicon was larger than Path lexicon. 3) Verb token: Manner usage was more frequent than Path. 4) Ground:

Ground information occurs in high frequency, about half of the time. 5) Multiple-action clauses are used in a complex event. 6) Descriptions of physical settings are frequent. These characteristics above are not entirely applicable to either S-language or V-language, thus Mandarin appears to be a unique language type in motion events

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encoding, and remains to be studied more. This present study focused on the analysis of the verbs, thus 1), 2) and 3) were used altogether as the criteria to examine the language-specific patterns of the motion verbs.