THE PROTO-MOTION EVENT SCHEMA: INTEGRATING LEXICAL SEMANTICS AND MORPHOLOGICAL SEQUENCING

Abstract

The present paper investigates Mandarin verbs of MOTION, one of the fundamental domains of human activities and extensively discussed areas in linguistic research.(1) Previous studies on Mandarin motion verbs are done primarily with a typological concern. However, given the iconic nature of serial motions in Mandarin, this paper attempts to provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the semantic-to-morphological and lexical-to-grammatical distinctions pertaining to the colloconstructional sequencing of motion verbs. Based on the Proto-Motion Event Schema (PMS), it offers an overarching framework for a top-down analysis of the conceptual structure of motion and a bottom-up examination of corpus-based collocations. Representing the iconic sequence of serial motion events, the Schema helps to identify the crucial semantic components, both verb-internally and verb-externally, for a systematic investigation and classification of motion progression. It attempts to establish a link for lexical semantic studies of motion from various perspectives. By probing into the conceptual basis of proto-motion event, the study ultimately offers an iconically-motivated account of the possible ranges of verb meaning and the semantic-to-morphosyntactic sequencing of Mandarin motion verbs.