"This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events, with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated to the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure, but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events, but more importantly, further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the scalar approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events, syntax-semantic interface, and typology"--.

• Encoding Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 The notion of motion event in this study
  • 1.2 Research questions and major proposals
    • 1.2.1 Research questions
    • 1.2.2 Major proposals
  • 1.3 Overview of the book
  • 1.4 Sources of Chinese data
• Chapter 2. Encoding motion in Chinese
  • 2.1 Word formation of Chinese motion verbs
  • 2.2 Motion verbs and motion morphemes: A corpus survey
    • 2.2.1 The corpus data
    • 2.2.2 The motion verbs
    • 2.2.3 The motion morphemes
  • 2.3 The motion construction consisting of multiple motion morphemes
    • 2.3.1 The motion construction consisting of two motion morphemes
    • 2.3.2 The motion construction consisting of three motion morphemes
    • 2.3.3 The motion construction consisting of more than three motion morphemes
  • 2.4 The ordering issue of Chinese motion morphemes
    • 2.4.1 The motion construction as a type of resultative verbal compound
    • 2.4.2 Temporal sequence and word order
    • 2.4.3 Classification of motion morphemes and word order
  • 2.5 Summary
• Chapter 3. “Manner vs. path” or “manner + path”?
  • 3.1 The notions of “manner” and “path” in previous studies
    • Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000)
    • Slobin (1997, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2006, among others)
    • Chu (2004, 2009)
    • Hsiao (2009)
  • 3.2 “Manner + path” motion verbs
    • 3.2.1 MP verbs across languages
    • 3.2.2 MP verbs in Chinese
  • 3.3 An alternative approach to manner and path
    • 3.3.1 Distinguishing manner from path
    • 3.3.2 Case studies
  • 3.4 “Manner + path” motion verbs revisited
    • 3.4.1 The manner/result (path) complementarity
    • 3.4.2 The Chinese “manner + path” morphemes re-examined
  • 3.5 Summary
• Chapter 4. Classifying Chinese motion morphemes
  • 4.1 The notion of scale structure
  • 4.2 A scale-based classification of Chinese motion morphemes
    • 4.2.1 Nonscalar change vs. scalar change motion morphemes
    • 4.2.2 Open scale vs. closed scale motion morphemes
    • 4.2.3 Multi-point closed scale vs. two-point closed scale motion morphemes
  • 4.3 A further look into “special” motion morphemes
    • 4.3.1 来 lái ‘come, hither’ /去 qù ‘go, thither’
    • 4.3.2 到 dào ‘arrive’
    • 4.3.3 上 shàng ‘ascend to’/下 xià ‘descend from’
    • 4.3.4 过 guò ‘cross’
  • 4.4 A four-way scalar classification of motion morphemes in the Novel Corpus
  • 4.5 Bound motion morphemes and their scale-based classification
    • 4.5.1 An overview of Chinese bound motion morphemes
    • 4.5.2 Scale-based classification of bound motion morphemes
  • 4.6 Summary
• References
• Name index
• Subject index