A Comparative Study Of The Lexicalization Patterns Of "Self-agentive" Motion Events In English And Chinese

There are many linguists, such as Greenberg, Comrie, Croft, et al. who aredevoted themselves to the researches on linguistic typology and language universals.Leonard Talmy also explores the typologies and universals from the perspective oflexicalization pattern theory and Event Integration theory and some other relativetheories. Based on Talmy’s these theories, this thesis tries to give an appliedcomparative study in the lexicalization patterns of “self-agentive” motion events inEnglish and Chinese, illustrates the possible motivations, and explores the inspirationsin pedagogy and translation.“Self-agentive” is a special causation with its own definition and characteristicsin the Talmy’s semantics of causation theory.“Self-agentive” motion events can alsoproduce their own structural distributions in the comparative analysis between Englishand Chinese. For this reason and due to the limitations, this thesis chooses16pairs ofdifferent examples in English and Chinese so as to give them a comparative analysisand summarization, tries to illustrate the possible motivations, and explores theinspirations in pedagogy and translation. The main research results in this thesis showthat the similarities and differences do exist in the lexicalization pattern of [Motion+Manner],[Motion+Path] and the Satellite. For instance, in expressing a consecutiveevent, in English it uses the lexicalization pattern [Sb.+GO+P₁+P₂+…] whileChinese uses a different kind of lexicalization pattern of [Sb.+（GO+P）₁+（GO+P）₂+（GO+P）₃…]. The motivations can be explained in some degree from the aspectsof phonology, thinking model and evolution. In pedagogy it can give differentinspirations on positive and negative transfer according to those similarities anddifferences, meanwhile, the different lexicalization processes can provide somemeaning-based directions in syntactic transformation for translation.