Overview

This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events, with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure, but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events, but more importantly, further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the cognitive functional approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events, syntax-semantic interface, and typology.

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9789027202147

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The book as a whole provides a finer-grained account for the lexicalization and distribution of motion morphemes in Mandarin Chinese. It revisits the manner/path classification by proposing a systematic scalar-based approach and combines it with independent sets of semantic tests. Motivated by the semantic and conceptual iconicity in the Chinese language, it also addresses the different orderings of motion morphemes by formulating a Motion Morpheme Hierarchy. In addition to the major findings for Chinese motion construction, the current work also sheds light on studies of motion construction in other languages and beyond the motion domain. -- Yi Wang, University College London, in Chinese Language and Discourse, Vol. 11:1 (2020).

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