| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 101 === The paper adopts the Proto-Motion Event Schema in Mandarin by Liu et al. (2012) to investigate the semantic-to-morphological distinction between the alternating pair of Mandarin motion sequences such as tuì-huí 退回 ‘recede-return’ vs. huí-tuì 回退 ‘return-recede’, as both are found in the corpus:
(1)a. 垃圾車只好退回。
lèsèchē zhǐhăo tuì-huí
trash.truck reluctant recede-return
‘A trash truck has no choice but to recede.’
b. 時間如流水，永遠都不會回退。
shíjiān rú liúshuǐ yǒngyuǎn dōu búhuì huí-tuì
time as flowing.water forever all never return-recede
‘Time doesn’t flow back as water never does.’
As illustrated above, tuì-huí 退回 in (1a) denotes a spatial movement while huí-tuì 回退 in (1b) is used for temporal predication. The spatial vs. non-spatial distinction is further confirmed by a corpus-based investigation that shows that morphological sequencing of motion verbs is correlated with semantic properties that are essential in defining motion events. Earlier studies on motion sequences suggested that motion is multifaceted and sequential in nation. Chen and Guo (2009) have exhausted eight possible combinations of Mandarin motion verbs. Lin (2011) applied scale structure to account for motion sequences and proposed a fixed order for motion morphemes based on the Motion Morpheme Hierarchy. Liu et al. (2012a) further specifies the core semantic components in defining and describing a motion event and proposed a Proto-Motion Event Schema to explain the morphological, semantic and syntactic behavior of motion verbs. The Schema displays a default sequence linearizing the crucial components of motion:
The left-to-right sequence specified in the Schema provides a sequential order for combining motion verbs, each of which lexically encodes a certain range of the components. In tuì-huí 退回, the morphological sequence follows the default order of the Schema, as V1 tuì 退 encoding Route and Direction is followed by a wider-ranged V2 huí 回 encoding Route, Direction, and Endpoint. The semantic portion of V2 outranges that of V1 toward the right. As for the reverse sequence huí-tuì 回退, the semantic range of V1 huí 回 would override that of V2 in a recessive way, clearly not abiding the default order.
A close look into corpus data confirmed the semantic-to-morphological correlation underlying the alternative sequential mechanism of Mandarin motion sequences. We claim that motion sequences following the default order, such as tuì-huí 退回, tend to predicate a spatial motion while the reversed order, such as huí-tuì 回退, tend to be used predominantly for non-spatial events.
The present paper aims to account for the compositional constraints of motion sequences with observed semantic-to-morphological correlations. We attempt to postulate a morphological version of lexical diffusion that modifies the morphological sequence in order to differentiate semantic and discourse functions.
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