When we see that chū-lái 出來 ‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去 ‘exit-go’ may take a SOURCE NP or a GOAL NP, it inevitably leads to the crucial question of how to account for such an ambiguity. In the serial combination of chū-lái 出 來
‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去 ‘exit-go’, which is the head or main predicate?
It has been observed by Lamarre (2009) that in isolation, both lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ only take GOAL NPs, but chū can take three kinds of roles: SOURCE (eg.
chūguó 出國 ‘exit-country’), ROUTE (eg. chūmén 出門 ‘exit-door’), or GOAL (eg.
chūyáng 出洋 ‘exit-(to) foreign country’). To verify Lamarre’s analysis with corpus data (Sinica Corpus), we examined the first 100 occurrences of the three verbs followed by a locative NP and found that while lái 來 ‘come’ and qù 去 ‘go’ indeed take a GOAL NP, the NPs following chū 出 ‘exit’ are clearly skewed toward a locative SOURCE (75%). 75 out of 100 instances of chū 出 ‘exit’ take a SOURCE NP; only 8 tokens of GOAL NPs are found (7 of which are the same chū-shèhuì 出社 會 ‘exit-society’). It clearly suggests that chū 出 ‘exit’ + SOURCE is predominent in use:
Table 7. Semantic Roles of Loc-NPs following 出/來/去
chū 出 + Locative NP lái 來 + Locative NP qù 去 + Locative NP SOURCE 75% (75/100) 0% (0/100) 0% (0/100) GOAL 8% (8/100) 100% (100/100) 100% (100/100) ROUTE 17% (17/100) 0% (0/100) 0% (0/100)
Based on the corpus findings that chū 出 ‘exit’ prefers SOURCE and lái 來
‘come’/ qù 去 ‘go’ only takes GOAL, we propose that the interpretation of the locative NP depends on the semantic prominence of the verbs in real use. When
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combined as serial verbs, either the directional chū 出 ‘exit’ or the deictic lái 來
‘come’/ qù 去 ‘go’ can serve as the semantic head, taking on the semantic prominence as the main predicate and hence selecting the appropriate locative role in the following NP. Specifically, when chū 出 ‘exit’ is semantically more prominent, SOURCE is profiled. In contrast, when lái 來 ‘come’/ qù 去 ‘go’ takes on semantic prominance, GOAL is preferred. The differences in semantic head and subsequent profiling of locative role can be illustrated by the repeated examples of (50) and (51) in (69) and (70) as well as schematic representations adopted and modified from Liu (1998:7):
(69) NPs as SOURCE following chū-lái 出來‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去‘exit-go’
a. 回飯店之後休息了一會~又出來飯店玩玩~
b. 佑佑出去房間再進來就是這副蠢樣
(70) NPs as GOAL following chū-lái 出來 ‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去 ‘exit-go’
a. 小悅出來餐廳吃飯都表現的好乖啊~
b. 我們真的很少出去餐廳吃飯, 都在家裡自己煮!
Table 8. Schematic Representations of chū-lái +NP and chū-qù+NP
(69a) 出來飯店 (70a) 出來餐廳
(69b) 出去房間 (70b) 出去餐廳
(O = moving entity, X= deictic center, =ROUTE, = backgrounded Loc-NP,
= profiled Loc-NP )
The dual role interpretation exhibited in the serial motion verbs bears significant theoretical implication to the long-debated issue in identifying the main predicate in Mandarin serial verb construction. It shows that semantic prominence may be the key to determinining which verb takes precedence in selecting the semantic role of the
X
X
X
X
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locative NP. Moreover, in some cases, the context seems to be the key of determining which verb takes the semantic prominence.
As we can see, Mandarin is a serial-verb language in which each verb in the series is morphologically unmarked and monosyllabic. The data above raise a problem for Talmy’s treatment of path verbs as satellites in serial-verb languages (1985).
Mandarin Chinese has been categorized as an S-language by Talmy. Talmy considers the manner verb to be the main verb and the path verb to be a satellite, because path verbs often do not function as full verbs and because there is a small, closed set of path verbs.
However, path verbs such as chū 出 ‘exit’ and lái 來 ‘come’/ qù 去 ‘go’ alone, or chū-lái 出來 ‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去 ‘exit-go’ are options used to express path. Moreover, because the path verbs can occur alone, they cannot be regarded as satellites, which are verb particles and affixes that do not occur alone. Therefore, the analysis of the dual role interpretation supports the typological classification argued in Slobin (2004) that a third typological category— Equipollently-framed languages—
should be added. Equipollently-framed languages include serial-verb languages and other types of languages in which manner and path are expressed by “equipollent”
elements—that is, elements that are equal in formal linguistic terms and appear to be equal in force or significance.
That the path verbs can occur alone is also observed in Tai (2003). He proposes that the cognitive component PATH guò 過 ‘pass’ can be used independently as a verb, and this is evidenced by the fact that it can be affixed with the aspect maker
“-le”, as illustrated below:
(71) 約翰過了英吉利海峽
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yuēhàn guò le yīngjílì hǎixiá NM pass ASP English Channel
‘John passed the English Channel.’
In contrast, the verb fēi 飛 ‘fly’ cannot occur alone without guò 過 ‘pass’ in this context, as illustrate below:
(72) *約翰飛了英吉利海峽 yuēhàn fēi le yīngjílì hǎixiá NM fly ASP English Channel
The above shows that guò 過 ‘pass’ is a verb incorporating PATH and is the center of predication in the verb compound fēi-guò 飛過 ‘fly-pass’. Based on the analysis, we may treat chū-lái 出來 ‘exit-come’ and chū-qù 出去 ‘exit-go’ as compounds consisting of two verbs incorporating PATH and either can be the center of predication.