Startseite Chinese synthetic verbs: a further challenge to manner/result complementarity on the basis of lexical root meaning analysis
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Chinese synthetic verbs: a further challenge to manner/result complementarity on the basis of lexical root meaning analysis

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 21. April 2023

Abstract

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation.


Corresponding author: Tianyu Li, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute, Beijing, China, E-mail:

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

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Received: 2021-11-27
Accepted: 2023-03-30
Published Online: 2023-04-21
Published in Print: 2023-05-25

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 20.9.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cog-2021-0121/html
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