An English-Chinese Study On Lexicalization Patterns Of Spontaneous Motion Events

Talmy suggests that English is a typical example of the satellite-framed languages, which allow sentences such as "The bottle floated into the cave", whereas other languages like French, Spanish are highly restricted in doing so such as "La bottella entro flotando a la cueva (The bottle entered floating to the cave)". According to Talmy, Chinese belongs to the same type of language category as English. The aim of the present study is then to examine the similarities and differences, if any, in patterns of lexicalization in verbs and path satellites in the domain of spontaneous motion events (what Talmy calls self-agentive motion events) between English and Chinese and to search for reasons that can account for them.We randomly collected 50 English verbs in the domain of spontaneous motion events and use them as reference words. All of the 50 verbs conflate motion with one of the seven manners mentioned in the previous paragraph. They all express a complicated concept in a single lexical form, which can not be structurally decomposed into smaller morphological components. In other words, they express semantic meanings in a synthetic way. Then we examine the corresponding Chinese words. We find that only 4 are simple (i.e., monosyllabic) verbs; 15 of them can be either simple or compounded; and the remaining 31 words are compounded. The results suggest that Chinese tends to express those synthetic meanings in English in an analytic way. Despite the differences in lexicalization pattern, manner-of-motion verbs in English and Chinese have similar semantic features in the respects of participants (arguments they take), duration, and telicity.The differences can be accounted for by two closely related reasons. One reason comes from the way we think. In the process of naming and understanding things, we Chinese pay more attention to generic relationship and properties in common between things, which ends up in compound words. On the contrary, English demonstratesthem as distinguished entities. The other reason is the characteristics of the Chinese language itself. Modern Chinese with a total number of 1376 syllables developed from ancient Chinese, in which monosyllabic words constituted the overwhelming group. According to the theory of Zi as the basic unit put forth by Xu Tongqiang in his Language, human society created millions of new things and concepts, and it was impossible to name all of them with the monosyllabic words. As a result, compound words were created. Yet the characteristics of the ancient Chinese still has influence on the language. So most of the compound words presents their meanings in an analytic way.Then in this paper, we examine the path satellites in English and Chinese, which are expressed separately in motion events. English satellites are verb particles. For Chinese, path satellites turn out to be directional complements in verb directional constructions. Altogether we get 20 single and 17 double directional complements. And these are the path satellites in Chinese.The Path is fully expressed by the combination of a satellite and a preposition. But sometimes the satellite and the preposition merge into a satellite-preposition or satprep for short. English, perhaps, has developed the satprep form because it has come to regularly juxtapose its inherited satellite and prepositions forms (Talmy 2000b: 108). An examination of data suggests that Chinese does have satpreps, just like English. But they are limited in number and restricted in use.