Lexicalization Patterns Of Motion Events In English,Chinese And German

Based on Talmy’s theory on the typology of motion events(Talmy 2000),this thesis selects the motion events expressions in Brothers by Yu Hua in Chinese,and its English and German translations as the research materials,and conducts an analysis of the motion events in three languages,trying to investigate the manner verbs and path verbs and then to summarize the similarities and dissimilarities between Chinese,English and German.At the same time,a new research perspective will be opened up for the comparative study of Chinese,English and German.There are several discoveries of this research based on the analysis of three versions of Brothers:Firstly,in the description of motion events,there are differences between the three languages in the frequency of using verbs to express motion events.The frequency of using verbs in Chinese and English is higher than that in German,and the frequency of using verbs in Chinese is the highest.This result indicates that Chinese is highly dynamic.Secondly,we classify manner verbs in the three texts into five main verb categories:walk,run,jump,crawl and and find that English is the most expressive language which has the finest manner verbs in the three languages and English also has most highly-lexicalized manner verbs in the three languages,followed by German.Chinese has the least-lexicalized manner verbs.Thirdly,in the study of path verbs in the three languages,this thesis finds that Chinese has the largest number of path verbs among the three languages.We conclude that Chinese presents the characteristics of verb-framed language based on varieties of path verbs.By contrast,English has the most typical features of satellite-framed language in the three languages.Finally,this thesis examines the events integration in the three languages.The comparison confirms Talmy’s statement that English is a typical satellite-framed language and German is a less typical satellite-framed language.However,based on the research of motion verbs in the Chinese text,this thesis holds that Chinese tends to be a verb-framed language considering the serial verb construction frequently used in the original text.This thesis has a significant value for the translation of motion events between Chinese,English and German.