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Typological shift in lexicalizing motion events: The case of Wenzhou

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Published/Copyright: April 11, 2020

Abstract

Typological shift in lexicalizing motion events has hitherto been observed cross-linguistically. While over time, Chinese has shown a shift from a dominantly verb-framed language in Old Chinese to a strongly satellite-framed language in Modern Standard Mandarin, this study presents the Chinese dialect Wenzhou, which has taken a step further than Standard Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in becoming a thoroughly satellite-framed language. On the one hand, Wenzhou strongly disfavors the verb-framed pattern. Wenzhou not only has no prototypical path verbs, but also its path satellites are highly deverbalized. On the other hand, Wenzhou strongly prefers the satellite-framed pattern, to the extent that it very frequently adopts a neutral motion verb to head motion expressions so that path can be expressed via satellites and the satellite-framed pattern can be syntactically maintained. The findings of this study are of interest to intra-linguistic, diachronic and cross-linguistic studies of the variation in encoding motion events.

Abbreviations

CLF

classifier

COMP

comparative marker

NEG

negative marker

NP

noun phrase

P

preposition

SFP

sentence-final particle

SMP

sentence-medial particle

PP

preposition phrase

PERF

perfective marker

PF

perfect marker

POSS

possessive marker

PROG

progressive marker

Q

question marker

REL

relative clause marker

V

verb

WSC

Wenzhou Spoken Corpus

Acknowledgements

This author would like to express her deepest gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers, the responsible editor and the Editor-in-Chief of Linguistic Typology for their inspiring comments and suggestions. I am also most grateful to Beth Levin and John Newman for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Parts of the study were presented at the Symposium on the Studies of Chinese Verbs (Stanford, 2016), the 17th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (Singapore, 2016), and the 10th International Conference on Wu Dialects (Hangzhou, 2018). I wish to express my appreciation to the audiences of these for their feedback. All errors are my own.

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Published Online: 2020-04-11
Published in Print: 2021-05-26

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