A Contrastive Study On Caused Motion Constructions In English And Chinese

Based on Talmy’s motion events theory and Goldberg’s construction grammar, this thesis conducts a contrastive study of caused motion constructions in English and Chinese. In English, caused motion constructions include SVO Construction and Double Object Construction; in Chinese, there are not only the above two constructions, but also BA Construction and SHI Construction. The contrastive study in this thesis develops along three lines. First, the main verbs in English and Chinese caused motion constructions are examined, drawing on the examples from English and Chinese fictions. After examining the constructional performance of those verbs with comparable causative semantics and syntax levels in the two languages, we find that English [Manner + Cause] verbs have high granularity while Chinese has relatively low granularity. This discovery conforms to Slobin’s conclusion that English is a high-manner salient language while Chinese is a low-manner salient language.Second, when analyzing the syntactic and semantic properties in English and Chinese caused motion constructions, we find differences exist in manner encoding and path encoding between English and Chinese. Those differences express different typological characteristics. Talmy classifies English and Chinese into satellite-framed languages and Slobin classifies Chinese into equipollently-framed languages based on its SVCs.Last, this thesis contrasts event structure of caused motion events in both languages. In conclusion, we hold that Chinese, compared with English, shows more characteristics of equipollently-framed languages.