Encoding motion events in Chinese and the “scalar specificity constraint”

Mandarin Chinese often expresses motion events with more than one verbal motion morpheme, e.g., 退 tui ‘recede’ and 回 hui ‘return’ in 退回房間裏 tui-hui fangjian-li recede-return room-inside ‘return into the room’. Building on recent work on “scale structure”, this paper proposes a “Motion Morpheme Hierarchy” that can be used to better predict the order of co-occurring motion morphemes: specifically, Chinese motion morphemes can be classified into four types based on the scale information they lexicalize, and the order of co-occurring motion morphemes tends to be closely related to the type of scale they lexicalize. The hierarchy is then verified using two corpus studies drawing on naturally occurring Chinese data: the first study examines the order of motion morphemes found in all motion constructions from selected recent Chinese novels, and the second study investigates the order of eight highly frequently used motion morphemes with respect to their co-occurring motion morphemes in the CCL Corpus; both corpus studies show that the hierarchy holds for most Chinese motion morphemes. Furthermore, this paper proposes a semantic constraint named the “Scalar Specificity Constraint” to account for the morpheme order predicted by the hierarchy: the morpheme with more information about the path of motion tends to occur after the morphemes with less information. For instance, 回 hui ‘recede’ lexicalizes an endpoint for the path and thus, is preceded by 退 tui ‘recede’ which does not indicate any endpoint. The constraint not only provides better coverage of the data involving Chinese motion constructions, but also indicates the role that the path information a motion morpheme lexicalizes plays in the morpheme’s distribution. This study provides new insight into the distribution of motion morphemes in Chinese MMMCs and a more fine-grained analysis of the semantic relationships between the morphemes in these constructions, and thus contributes to an increased understanding of how motion events are expressed in Chinese. The findings of this study may also illuminate the distribution of motion verbs in other languages, as well as constructions in domains beyond motion.