Proposed interaction between verb and preposition in the encoding of motion events. A contrastive study between Spanish and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Spanish and Mandarin Chinese have been classified as verb-framed language and satellite-framed language respectively (Talmy: 1991, 2000). However, in Spanish, manner verbs are compatible with hacia and hasta, and a small group of them can do so with a. The typological discussion on Mandarin Chinese focuses on the serial verb construction of “manner verb + path word”, in which the second constituent lacking morphological variation can also function independently as path verb. To try to shed light on these discussions, we propose that the core scheme —the directional path— of the motion event is generated through the interaction between the verb and the preposition, in which the manner verb with external movement implies a non- directional path which plays a primary role, while the preposition and the second constituent of the Chinese serial verb construction are only direction indicators that do not contribute any path. The analysis of the combinatory between manner verbs and hacia, hasta, a, as well as their equivalent Chinese expressions, support our hypothesis and they let conclude that: a is locative; Chinese serial verb construction belongs to the satellite-framed language type; the extensive value of hasta does not favor the generation of the directional path, but that of its Chinese equivalent can do so.

Keywords

• Linguistic typology, Spanish-Mandarin Chinese contrastivity, motion event, manner verb, preposition.