A Contrastive Study On Paths In English And Chinese Caused Translocative Motion Events

As one of the most special categories in Translocative Motion Events,Caused Translocative Motion Events have received wide attention in the research field of Motion Events.This thesis is a contrastive study on Paths in English and Chinese Caused Translocative Motion Events with the support of self-built corpus and online corpora.The aim of this study is to contrast the expressions of different sub-parameters of Paths in different types of English and Chinese Caused Translocative Motion Events from four main aspects:Vector,Direction,Conformation and Boundedness,expecting to investigate some similarities and dissimilarities.Finally,the factors behind the similarities and dissimilarities are analyzed.Major findings are as follows:Our analysis reveals that English and Chinese demonstrate some similarities in terms of Vector,Conformation,and state of Boundedness:With regard to Vector,single patterns of expressing one of the Vectors are preferred by English and Chinese in real CTME units,and both two languages exhibit great tendency to express the Arrival of Paths,while implicitate the medial segments of the moving trajectories;no remarkable differences in terms of quantity of cases expressing Conformation in the two languages;both English and Chinese CTMEs embrace the salient expressions of bounded Paths.The results also show some differences in the two languages:1)English has more combinatorial patterns for expressing Vectors into one Caused Translocative Motion Event unit,showing much more chronological flexibility in expressing Paths;2)As for Direction,English tends to employ more absolute earth-based directional expressions,while relative directions show much more occurrences in Chinese.Chinese has a lot more cases of deictic directions due to the prevalent use of "lai来/qu 去",especially in disposal types like BA constructions;3)English has more precise lexemes for expressing different geometric relations between Figure and Ground;the information of shapes of Paths are always encoded in Path verbs and preps in English,while the shape information is achieved by other semantic elements of motion events or even being omitted in Chinese;4)English and Chinese present divergent distributional models in terms of different types of Caused Translocative Motion Events.English SVOs predominate;while SVO and disposal cases are given priorities in Chinese.Chinese double object constructions can exhibit two semantic directions of "giving" and "taking",while English double object constructions can only encode the "giving" direction.The factors behind the similarities and dissimilarities are analyzed from the perspectives of cognition,language systems and constructions.On the one hand,because of the gestalt mentality and similar cognitive mechanism of Windowing and Gapping that human beings share,English and Chinese have similar preferences for expressing certain features of Paths in Caused Translocative Motion Events.On the other hand,the individuality of perspectival system and different language systems to which the two languages belong trigger diverse ways of representing Path information.English is more static in employing a series of preps to encode Path information,while Chinese refrains from such usage but tends to adopt the serial verbal structures.Moreover,differences in language systems result in different preferences for specificity of Path expressions when confronted with inevitable disjunctiveness of languages.Chinese tends to employ underspecified expressions of Paths with less expressing efforts while English embraces more specified ways.In addition,constructional factors also influence the popularity of choosing different types of Caused Translocative Motion Events in two languages.English prefers constructions with less analytic efforts and stronger coercion,like Double Object Constructions and English Caused Motion Constructions;Chinese prefers constructions easily expressing boundedness and translocativeness like BA constructions.The present thesis provides a systematic analysis of Paths in Caused Translocative Motion Events between English and Chinese and will be of great significance to the research fields of language typology and motion event translation.