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Article published In: Corpus Approaches to Language, Thought and Communication
Edited by Wei-lun Lu, Naděžda Kudrnáčová and Laura A. Janda
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:1] 2019
► pp. 155–186

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Regular articles

Evolutionary order of macro-events in Mandarin

 | Beihang University
Published online: 20 August 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00030.li
Abstract
This article aims to explore the evolutionary order of the five types of macro-event in Mandarin. As a methodology, a closed corpus is set up for five historical stages. The following is concluded: (1) The “V+C” constructions representing a macro-event started to appear from Stage III and continued to be used until the present stage; (2) The “V+C” constructions can only represent four out of five types of Talmy’s macro-event, and action correlating is not systematically represented; (3) The four types of macro-event appeared at a relatively similar time period, and their proportion is: Motion > State change > Temporal > Realization; (4) Verbs with PATH meaning in the V2 slot are more prone to grammaticalization than in the V1 in the serial verb construction “V1+V2”. This research is significant in bridging the areas of event structure, grammaticalization and typology, and might have implications for other languages as well.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Evolutionary trend of the 11 simplex directional complements
    • 3.1Preliminary data for the 11 directional complements
    • 3.2The evolutionary trend of the 11 simplex directional complements
    • 3.3Evolutionary order of macro-event types in Stage III
    • 3.4Evolutionary order of macro-events in Stage IV
    • 3.5Evolutionary order of macro-events in Stage V
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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