The Order of Mandarin Chinese Motion Morphemes and the “Scalar Specificity Constraint”

The Order of Mandarin Chinese Motion Morphemes and the “Scalar Specificity Constraint”＊ Jingxia Lin Department of Chinese & Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University GH618, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong ctjlin@polyu.edu.hk Abstract. This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin multi-morpheme motion constructions (e.g., tui-hui recede-return). It classifies Chinese motion morphemes into three major types and proposes a “Scalar Specificity Constraint” to account for the order in multi-morpheme motion constructions. The constraint not only provides a better coverage of the data of Chinese motion constructions from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface, but also illuminates the distribution of motion verbs in other serial verb languages. Keywords: order of motion morphemes, Scalar Specificity Constraint, Mandarin Chinese 1 Introduction Mandarin Chinese (hereafter “Chinese”) often expresses directed motion events through a concatenation of verbal morphemes, e.g., gun „roll‟ and jin „enter‟ in gun-jin shui-li „roll into the water‟. 1 However, the order of these co-occurring motion morphemes is not flexible, e.g., *jin-gun shui-li enter-roll water-inside. This paper first reviews previous studies on the order of Chinese motion morphemes, and then provides proposals that can better explain the order. 2 Previous Studies This section reviews previous studies on the order of motion morphemes in Chinese MMMCs, and shows that a more refined proposal is still necessary. 2.1 RVC and the Morpheme Order Previous studies (e.g., Li and Thompson (1981), among others) treat Chinese motion constructions as a type of resultative verbal compounds (RVC), in which the second morpheme specifies the direction of motion as a result of the action denoted by the first morpheme (Li and Thompson 1981). For instance, in (1a) and (1b), the second morpheme luo „fall‟ and jin „enter‟ are understood as the results of the event of rolling. (1) a. huapo chu buduan you xuanshi gun-luo landslide place continuously have hanging.stone roll-fall ＊This paper is partially based on my dissertation. I would like to thank Beth Levin and Chaofen Sun for their insightful advice on the dissertation and Chu-Ren Huang for his helpful comments on the draft of the paper. The usual disclaimers apply. 1 This paper uses the term “motion morphemes” instead of “motion verbs” because previous studies have not reached a consensus on the lexical status of some motion morphemes. The lexical status of Chinese motion morphemes is not the focus of this study. Copyright 2011 by Jingxia Lin 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 525–532 525 „There were hanging stones continuously rolling and falling from the place of landslide‟ (PKU Corpus)2 b. na-kuai tiaoshi gun-jin-le yan-xia de shui-jian that-CLF square.stone roll-enter-ASP cliff-below REL water.stream „That square stone rolled into the stream under the cliff.‟ (PKU Corpus) However, the RVC account cannot explain why when luo „fall‟ and jin „enter‟ co-occur, only luo precedes jin (2a), but not vice versa (2b), given that both morphemes can have a result understanding, as (1a) and (1b) illustrate. (2) a. huran yi-kuai shizi luo-jin-le shui-li suddenly one-CLF pebble fall-enter-ASP …

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