Which爓ay炉o爉ove.PDF

Which way to move:   The evolution of motion expressions in Chinese  Wenlei Shi / Yicheng Wu  Center for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310028, P.R.China   Abstract: This article re-examines from an evolutionary perspective the typological status of Chinese, with regard to the issue of how the information of motion events is encoded (Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). We investigate, with emphasis on the roles of both language structure and language use, the four periods of Chinese (Old, Middle, Pre-Modern and Modern) in terms of parameters such as PATH, MANNER and GROUND, and compare with typologically different languages, namely, verb-framed languages like Spanish and satellite-framed languages like English. Our statistical study shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language, and Pre-Modern Chinese is a stepped-up period with respect to the speed of evolution; (ii) Modern Chinese adopts diverse patterns to encode motion events, which are different from both typical verb-framed languages and typical satellite-framed languages. We thus conclude that (i) contrary to Peyraube’s (2006) claim, the typological shift in Chinese has not been achieved yet; (ii) there is little justification for classifying Chinese as an equipollently-framed language as in Slobin (2004) and Chen and Guo (2009), and accordingly, there is no need to posit an equipollent-type for Chinese; and (iii) Modern Chinese is in a transitional state from V-type toward S-type in light of the evolution of its motion expressions, and favours the side of S-type, considered from both morphosyntactic properties and language use.   Keywords: motion event, lexicalization pattern, language