The Segmentation and Representation of Translocative Motion Events in English and Chinese Discourse : A Contrastive Study

This book provides a systematic, contrastive analysis of the segmentation and representation of English and Chinese Translocative Motion Events (TMEs), which possess Macro-Event Property (MEP). It addresses all the issues critical to understanding TMEs in English and Chinese, from event segmentation, MEP principles and the conceptual structure of TMEs and their constituents, to the representation of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground. The book argues that the corpus-based alignment for the TME segmentation in both languages, the parameters of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground and their relevant statistical description are particularly important for understanding English and Chinese TMEs. The linguistic materialization of Actant, Ground, Path and Motion, together with a wealth of tables and figures, offers convincing evidence to support the typological classification of English and Chinese. The book’s suggestions regarding the Talmyan bipartite typology and Bohnemeyer’s MEP contribute to the advancement of TME studies and language typology, and help learners to understand motion events and English-Chinese typological similarities and differences. Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii Introduction (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 1-12 MEP Principles and the Segmentation and Representation of TMEs (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 13-55 Research Design and Data Tagging (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 57-78 General Statistical Description of English and Chinese TME Constructions (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 79-104 Contrasting the Representation of TMEs in English and Chinese (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 105-167 Conclusion (Guofeng Zheng)....Pages 169-174 Back Matter ....Pages 175-190