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Article published In: Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 9:2 (2018) ► pp.136–161

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Articles

“He killed a chicken, but it didn’t die”

An empirical study of the lexicalization of state change in Mandarin monomorphemic verbs

 | California State University
Published online: 13 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.17007.che
Abstract
Mandarin contrasts typologically with English in its lexicalization of state change (. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Edited by Leonard Talmy. Vol. II1: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The majority of Mandarin monomorphemic verbs is moot about or implies a state change, whereas English has many monomorphemic verbs (e.g. kill) that entail a state change. This study investigates empirically the nuanced lexicalization of state-change implicature in Mandarin monomorphemic verbs and its implications for the linguistic typology of encoding state change. Two experiments were conducted with adult native Mandarin speakers: a rating task about the acceptability of sentences that expressed a failure of fulfilment of a state-change (e.g. Zhangsan sha le ji, ke shi ji mei si ‘Zhangsan killed a chicken, but it didn’t die’) and a multiple-choice task that probed the preferred interpretation of monomorphemic state-change verbs. The results of both studies reveal a significant effect of verb types and post hoc comparisons show a cline of state-change implicature in the target verbs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • State-change events
    • State-change verbs in Mandarin
  • 2.The current study
    • 2.1Study 1: Semantic acceptability rating survey
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure
      • Analysis and results
    • 2.2Study 2: Multiple-choice task of verb meaning
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure
      • Analysis and results
  • 3.Discussion
    • A continuum of state-change implicature
    • The typology of lexicalization of state change
    • Lexical aspects of the target monomorphemic verbs
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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