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Variable motion encoding within Chinese: a usage-based perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2023

Shujun Chen  and
Lihuan Wu
Shujun Chen
Affiliation:
Faculty of English Language and Culture, Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China
Lihuan Wu*
Affiliation:
School of Foreign Languages, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
*
Corresponding author: Lihuan Wu; Email: wulihuan@ecust.edu.cn
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Abstract

Languages differ considerably in the way they encode motion. Previous research on motion encoding has paid much attention to inter-typological variation (i.e., variation between language types) and intra-typological variation (i.e., variation within language types), but less focus on intra-linguistic variation (i.e., variation within particular languages). To fill this niche, the current study compares actual motion and metaphorical motion in Standard Mandarin Chinese with a corpus-based approach. We ask whether the typological properties in actual motion extend to metaphorical motion. The results indicate that the answer is negative. The typological properties including lexicalization patterns and the distribution of semantic components vary by both event type (actual motion vs. metaphorical motion) and genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) within Chinese. The intra-linguistic variation can be explained by additional factors – the pragmatic context and the structural property of Chinese. These findings support a constructional proposal of the motion event typology, which is a more nuanced typology that expands the binary distinction between V-languages and S-languages. In this proposal, the consideration of the scalar dimension enables more explicit descriptions of variation within languages (shift left- or rightward on the scale) and more accurate explanations for these phenomena.

Keywords

Actual motionconstruction grammarintra-linguistic variationmetaphorical motionmotion event typology
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 480 - 502
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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