Typological shift of Mandarin Chinese in terms of motion verb lexicalization pattern

3.2.1 Research questions

The general goal of this study is to further investigate the language typology of ancient Chinese and modern Chinese and then account for the very likely typological shift. Specifically, this study tries to answer the following three research questions:

1. Which typological category do ancient Chinese and modern Chinese belong to respectively, satellite-framed or verb-framed?

2. How does Chinese typological category shift from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese?

3. How has the process of disyllabification that Chinese has undergone in its evolution from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese affected the typology of Chinese?

3.2.2 Research material

As already mentioned, the research material of the present study is the motion verbs from two authoritative dictionaries, namely, The Ancient Chinese Dictionary (2nd Edition) and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition), both of which are the latest editions published by the Commercial Press, an enduring publishing house in China.

The Ancient Chinese Dictionary, as the title suggests, is the source of motion verbs in ancient Chinese. The entries in the dictionary, 14,200 monosyllabic and 28,000 disyllabic, are primarily selected from representative ancient Chinese books and documents, such as The Analects, Mencius, A History of the Later Han Dynasty, etc., predominantly from the Pre-Qin and Han dynasties, which coincide with the beginning of the upsurge of disyllabic verb compounds of modifier + head configuration (Dong 2011: 145). If the compound happens to be a motion verb, it satisfies the [Motion + Manner] lexicalization pattern and adds to this specific lexical inventory, and ultimately skews the language towards a satellite-framed language. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary serves as the source of motion verbs in modern Chinese, 56,000 dictionary entries making up the mainstream vocabulary of Mandarin Chinese.

It should be acknowledged, nonetheless, that dictionary resources may represent varieties other than spontaneous language use, which can be particularly true of The Ancient Chinese Dictionary, though some of its resources, such as The Analects, are claimed to be close to the spoken variety. Another limitation of our decision on the present research material is that the frequency dimension is largely neglected though we are of the view that it takes a threshold frequency for a linguistic configuration to be lexicalized and listed as a dictionary entry. As a comprise, we try to incorporate a frequency examination of a small but important subcategory of motion verbs, the so-called directional verbs (see Section 5.2.3).

3.2.3 Research procedure

Motion verbs are collected in four steps. Step one is distinguishing words from bound morphemes. This study aims to investigate words, so bound morphemes need to be excluded. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary has made the distinction by annotating word-class information for words. The Ancient Chinese Dictionary lacks such information, but each entry is followed by at least one example sentence, which means that the entry can stand independently as a word. So we are in a position to treat entries in The Ancient Chinese Dictionary as words.

The second step is identifying verbs. In Talmy (2000b: 27), where the focus is mainly on verb roots across various languages, the Chinese verb roots are supposed to be able to stand alone as entire words, which indicates that we can directly treat verb entries in the Chinese dictionaries as verb roots and collect them as research material. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary has labeled its entries with word-class information; when it comes to The Ancient Chinese Dictionary, we make reference to entry definitions and the syntactic slots in which they occur in the example sentences to identify verbs.

The third step is identifying motion verbs. In the framework of Talmy’s motion event theory, the semantic component of Motion does not include all kinds of motions that a Figure could exhibit. Instead, it refers specifically to the occurrence (MOVE) or nonoccurrence (BE_LOC) of translational motion in which the location of the Figure changes with respect to the Ground in a certain time. Particularly, it excludes self-contained motions such as dilation, rotation and oscillation, in which the Figure does not change its location with respect to the Ground (Talmy 2000b: 25–26). Therefore, Chinese verbs like 转 (zhuàn, ‘to rotate’) and 膨胀 (péngzhàng, ‘to dilate’) are excluded from our study. Also excluded are those motion verbs that involve the movement of a particular body part while the whole body does not change its location with respect to the Ground, such as 顉 (qīn, ‘to nod’), 耸肩 (sǒngjiān, ‘to shrug’), etc., because the Figure is usually conceptualized as an indivisible zero-dimensional unit, even though its internal components form multidimensional relationships (Talmy 2000a: 183).

Then the lexicalization pattern of each identified motion verb is analyzed and subcategorized. When a verb is polysemous and shows more than one lexicalization pattern, we label each with a subscript number. For instance, in modern Chinese, 跑 (pǎo) is of the [Motion + Manner] lexicalization pattern when expressing the meaning ‘to run’ and ‘to walk’, but of [Motion + Path] when used to mean ‘to leave’. So we end up with 跑₁ and 跑₂ to acknowledge the two lexicalization patterns. The same applies to words that show more than two lexicalization patterns. To capture this feature in our calculation, we assign value “1” to each motion verb, and divide the value by the number of lexicalization patterns that a motion verb exhibits. In the case of 跑, the two patterns 跑₁ and 跑₂ will each get a value of “0.5”.

To guarantee maximal reliability, we have two coders to label the words. The initial inter-coder agreement is 91.3 %. All discrepancies are then resolved by turning to a third coder before statistics are calculated and sorted out for research purposes.

5.2.1 Coordinating compounds

Coordination of monosyllabic words can meet the requirements of disyllabification without drastically altering the basic semantics of the original monosyllables, which explains why it is favored in the process of disyllabification. With regard to the semantic relation between the component roots, coordinating compound words fall into compounds of synonymous roots, antonymous roots, and similar roots, where “similar” means that the component roots are of the same category and somewhat related in semantic meaning (Dong and Yin 2021). The results of our analysis are presented in Table 9.

According to Table 9, in both ancient and modern Chinese, coordinating motion verbs of synonymous roots make up the largest category, accounting for more than half of their respective total, which gives this combination the dominant status. Coordinating motion verbs of similar roots come second and those of antonymous roots are the least seen. In what follows, the three types are discussed one by one.

Coordinating motion verbs of synonymous roots can be illustrated in (1).

The ancient Chinese motion verb 陨坠 consists of two verbal roots 陨 and 坠, both meaning “to fall”. They also contain the same semantic components, namely, Motion and Path. Similarly, in modern Chinese, the disyllabic motion verb 飞翔, whose lexicalization pattern is [Motion + Manner], is composed of two synonymous verbal roots 飞 and 翔, both of the same semantic components Motion and Manner. It can be seen that the two synonymous roots of the same semantic components are simply juxtaposed to form disyllabic motion verbs.

When it comes to the lexicalization pattern of such motion verbs, the most dominant pattern in ancient Chinese, as demonstrated in Table 10, is [Motion + Path] with the number of 21, accounting for 38.89 %, while in modern Chinese, the most dominant is [Motion + Manner], 46 in number or 45.10 % in proportion. This is in line with the overall typological shift from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese. There is, however, something that seems to stray from the general shifting pattern; that is, verbs of [Motion + Path] have also increased in number as well as in proportion, from 21 (38.89 %) in ancient Chinese to 44 (43.14 %) in modern Chinese. A closer look, in any case, can switch off this alarm. The biggest increase is seen in the lexicalization pattern [Motion + Manner], by 9.91 %, which can dwarf that of [Motion + Path] (4.25 %). On top of that, there is the general trend of disyllabification, which can stand as good reason for the increase, especially given the slight advantage of [Motion + Path] over other lexicalization patterns in ancient Chinese and the coordinating characteristic of this type of motion compounds.

The results of coordinating motion verbs of antonymous roots are listed in Table 11.

In comparison with coordinating motion verbs of synonymous roots, the number of disyllabic motion verbs with antonymous roots is much smaller, which can be attributed to the relatively small number of monosyllabic free verbal morphemes that are antonymous and the relative difficulty with which antonyms come together to express one meaning. The dominant lexicalization pattern is [Motion + Path] in both ancient and modern Chinese. See (2) for illustration.

The disyllabic motion verb 沉浮 is composed of two antonymous verbal roots 沉 (‘to sink’) and 浮 (‘to float’), both encoding the semantic components of Motion and Manner. Similarly, the two verbal roots of the modern Chinese motion verb 出入 also share the same semantic components, namely, Motion and Path.

The third category is coordinating motion verbs of similar roots, which can be illustrated by (3).

This example is found in ancient Chinese as well as in modern Chinese. Both 跋 and 涉 express the meaning of walking, but emphasize different venues for walking. So they are related in meaning, but it is a relation beyond synonymy and antonymy.

Statistics in Table 12 show that the dominant lexicalization pattern of this compound category in ancient Chinese is [Motion + Path] whereas that in modern Chinese is [Motion + Manner], which also helps the Chinese language to gather momentum to shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed one in terms of lexicalization pattern.

To recap, in ancient Chinese, synonymous verbal roots that contain Motion and Path seem easier to be juxtaposed to form disyllabic motion verbs. But in modern Chinese, synonymous verbal roots conflating Motion and Manner enjoy greater ease to be combined to form disyllabic motion verbs. As for the second largest category, coordinating motion verbs with similar roots, the verbal root containing Motion and Path is more likely to combine with another verbal root in ancient Chinese, but in modern Chinese, the verbal root including Motion and Manner is more liable to form a coordinating motion verb with a similar root. Such differences between ancient and modern Chinese have driven the language to change its typological category. When it comes to coordinating motion verbs with antonymous roots, verbal roots encoding Motion and Path are more capable of forming disyllabic motion verbs in both ancient and modern Chinese. But this type is of a fairly small number, thus of very limited impact on the Chinese typology. It should be noted that as the norm coordination does not change the lexicalization pattern of the disyllabic word from its component monosyllables; this process impacts language typology by instantiating more frequently in semantic patterns with Manner than those with Path.

5.2.2 Modifier-head compounds

As the name to this group of compounds indicates, the former root is the modifier of the latter, the structural head. When the head is a verb, the modifier is by default a manner adverbial. This is attested by the two motion verb inventories; that is, the semantic component of Manner is encoded in every modifier-head motion verb, though Path and Cause may also be incorporated. When Table 8 is referred to, there has been a significant increase in motion verbs of modifier-head configuration from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese (by 14.40 percentage points), which makes this group of motion verbs an important driving force in the typological shift of the Chinese language. As a matter of fact, modifier-head compounds stand as the single most important contributor to Chinese typological shift in terms of sheer number. The specific results of lexicalization pattern analysis are presented in Table 13.

When the modifiers are examined more closely, they seem to fall into different categories. First, they can be nominals functioning as the manner adverbial of the head verbs. In (4), for example, both 蛇 (‘snake’) and 酒 (‘wine’) are nouns, indicating the manner of the action coded in the compound head.

The modifier can also be verbs, as illustrated in (5), where 抄 highlights taking a tortuous route as an important attack strategy and 赶 means to do something in a hurried manner.

The modifier, of course, is also coded in adverbs, the default word class for adverbial modifiers. In (6), 时 in 时迈 is an adverb, meaning ‘punctually’, and 独 in 独行 is of the same word class, meaning ‘alone’.

When we compare the motion verbs in ancient and modern Chinese, 21 disyllabic motion verbs are found in both lists, and 20 of them have maintained the same word structure over time, leaving 奔走 (bēnzǒu) an exceptional case. In ancient Chinese, it means ‘to run’ and belongs to the coordinating type of synonymous roots, in that both 奔 and 走 mean ‘to run’ and conflate the semantic components of Motion and Manner. However, in modern Chinese, 奔走 has come to mean ‘to run quickly’, and thus belonging to the type of modifier-head compound, with 奔 modifying the translational motion of 走 by giving prominence to the speed. As a matter of fact, 走 originally meant “to run”, and it was later on that it lost the semantic component of “fast” to mean “to walk”. In modern Chinese, it also functions as an ideograph, where the speed meaning is still existent to mark its semantic origin.

Perhaps not too much can be read into this individual case, but when the predominant role of modifier-head compound motion verbs is taken into consideration, it may represent a still ongoing trend. In any case, the slot immediately preceding the head verb is by default for the adverbial, of which manner is a ready candidate. Though in Talmy’s framework Manner is not taken as an internal component of a Motion event, it is nonetheless the case for an action to occur in a certain manner, which makes manner also an intrinsic dimension. This observation is also attested by a more general principle, the principle of iconicity: the manner adverbial is the closest to the head verb of all adjunct elements in Mandarin Chinese. Given this relational advantage, the lexicalization of modifier + head also precedes other syntactic configurations in the process of disyllabification (cf. Dong 2011, p. 156). Furthermore, there is the key mechanism of reanalysis in grammaticalization, which may very well enable a previously coordinating element to be reanalyzed as a modifier.

In short, the semantic component of Manner is included in each and every modifier-head motion verb. Unlike in ancient Chinese, such compound words in modern Chinese have not only witnessed a drastic surge in number and proportion, but also greater diversity in lexicalization pattern, which can be a crucial reason for Chinese to transit from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed one.

5.2.3 Verb-complement compounds

In verb-complement compounds, the latter root complements the former, usually denoting the result (e.g. 向迩, xiàngěr, ‘to move close’) or direction (e.g. 赶上, gǎnshàng, ‘to catch up’) of an action. As noted in literature review, their interpretation is among the most contested, and one major difficulty concerns the establishment of the core of the verb-complement compound. Some linguists suggest that the root is the core while others think that the complement root is more important according to the principle of end-weight (Li and Cao 2015), a dispute that has given rise to different assignments of the same compound to different lexicalization patterns.

According to the semantic characteristics of the complementary morpheme, verb-complement motion verbs of ancient and modern Chinese are listed in Table 14. The figures show that Path has become the most seen semantic component in this type of verb compounds in modern Chinese, in particular those with directional complements (14 out of a total of 15). This is at variance with the general trend of the typological shift of Chinese, but given the general idea that today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax, there is not much to be alarmed.

First, the sheer number of verb-complement disyllabic motion verbs is far from big, five in ancient Chinese and 37 in modern Chinese. Second, the imbalance is mainly seen in the compounds with directional complements (14 of [Motion + Path] and one of [Motion + Path + Manner]). When the 15 compounds are closely examined, the directional roots make up a closed class of four members only, 来 (lái, ‘to come’), 去 (qù, ‘to go’), 回 (huí, ‘to return’), and 上 (shàng, ‘(to go) up). As a matter of fact, directional verbs are no more than a small closed word class as a whole. More importantly, these motion verbs can be taken as lexicalized syntactic configurations; they are lacking in ancient Chinese simply because they were yet to be lexicalized. Moreover, lexicalization is a matter of degree and the establishment of wordhood is never an easy job. When such verbs are interpreted as syntactic rather than lexical units, directional roots serve the function of satellites in Talmy’s terminology. Even when the wordhood of the 14 compounds of [Motion + Path] are taken for granted, there seems to be an imbalance between their use as verbs and that as directional complements. The Frequency Table of Word Subcategories in the Modern Chinese Corpus (现代汉语语料库词语分词类频率表)^[5] is a source that differentiates the two uses, and the relevant results are presented in Table 15. Overall, the ranking of their complement use is much higher than that of their verb use, implying that they are more frequently used as satellites. Although there are five of them (in bold font) that are more frequently used as verbs, a close examination reveals that none of them ranks high enough to reverse the trend. Then it seems that these motion verbs, though of [Motion + Path] semantic conflation, can also drive the Chinese language towards the end of satellite-framed languages in actual use.

5.2.4 Verb-object compounds

In verb-object compound motion verbs, the former root represents the action and the latter signifies the entity that the action commands or involves. Since verbal morphemes and nominal morphemes are the most among free monosyllabic morphemes in Chinese (Yin 1984), abundant material can be fed for the lexicalization of disyllabic verb-object compounds. As shown in Table 16, there is a significant upsurge in the number of verb-object motion verbs from 41 in ancient Chinese to 113 in modern Chinese. In terms of lexicalization pattern, the greatest contribution is again from [Motion + Manner] (11 vs. 56.5). When the two more complicated patterns are also taken into account, the tendency can be even more conspicuous, with an addition of 26 (23 + 3) in modern Chinese vis-a-vis 7 in ancient Chinese.

The reason lies again at the morphology-syntax interface. When the compounds of this category are examined, many of them, if not all, are simply fusions of the predicate verb with its object, some still allowing syntactic operations, such as addition of aspect markers in between. The V-O relation is far from homogeneous. A total of 13 role types of objects has actually been established in modern Chinese^[6] and all can occur immediately post the predicate verb. See (7) for illustration of some role types with the verb 遛 (‘to walk/stroll’).

To sum up, in ancient Chinese, path verbs whose lexicalization pattern is [Motion + Path] are more capable of combining with a nominal root to form disyllabic motion verbs. However, in modern Chinese, manner verbs with the lexicalization pattern of [Motion + Manner] are more capable of forming new verb-object motion verbs. This difference between ancient and modern Chinese adds to the momentum of the typological shift of the language.

In reversal to verb-object compound motion verbs are those of the subject-predicate configuration. Only three of them are found in ancient Chinese, as represented in Table 17.

In the three cases, 日 (‘sun’), 骁 (‘horse’) and 鹰 (‘eagle’) are the entities that respectively conduct the motion of 下 (‘to go down’), 腾 (‘to gallop’) and 扬 (‘to fly high’). As shown in the above table, the meaning of the subject-predicate motion verb can be represented by a full sentence, which to a certain extent explains why there are merely three such motion verbs in ancient Chinese only. Unlike object which falls within VP in terms of syntactic analysis, subject lies outside VP, which renders it difficult to fuse with the verb and undergo the process of lexicalization. As a matter of fact, modern Chinese seems to have dropped this lexicalization pattern altogether so far as motion verbs are concerned. Here again we see the interfacing between morphology and syntax.

5.3.1 Cooccurrence of path and manner in one single motion verb

Apart from Talmy’s bipartite typology, there are other language types that have been assigned to the Chinese language, and the lexicalization pattern analysis of Chinese motion verbs has indeed manifested some features of equipollently-framed languages. Specifically, Tables 2 and 3 show that the pattern [Motion + Path + Manner], which characterizes the equipollently-framed language, accounts for 22.41 % in ancient Chinese and 22.48 % in modern Chinese. High as the figures are, they still lag significantly behind those for [Motion + Path] and [Motion + Manner] in both tables, implying that [Motion + Path + Manner], though frequently instantiated over time, is never dominant in the evolution of the language. In any case, it is necessary to account for its persistent existence.

When the monosyllables are concerned, there are 101 (or 87.32 when weighted) motion verbs in ancient Chinese and 25 (22.33 after weighting) in modern Chinese that are of the lexicalization concerned. The sharp decline is driven by multiple reasons, such as loss of motion verb status, conflation of variant forms (see Section 5.1 for details), but we want to focus on two important cognitive bases here for the occurrence of both Path and Manner in one single syllable. The first one is that some motions inherently consist of both semantic components, such as 滴 (dī) and 沥 (lì), both meaning ‘([of liquid] to drip in small drops’), in that liquid, when dripping, will go downward by default. And it is no wonder that the English explanation ‘drip’ also embodies both semantic features. Some other English examples include ‘roam’ when meaning ‘to walk or travel around an area without any definite aim or direction’, ‘bail’ when meaning ‘to leave a place, especially quickly’, etc. The second concerns motion verbs converted from nouns, which is a prevalent phenomenon in Chinese. For instance, 波 (bō), originally a noun meaning ‘wave’, comes to express ‘to walk along the river’ as a motion verb. Again, Chinese is not alone in this regard, because the English word ‘beach’ can be a ready counterpart when it is used to mean ‘to come or bring something out of the water and onto the beach’. In both cases, the Path component is metonymically specified by their respective nominal use. Therefore, it may well be a language universal for some motion verbs to consist of both Path and Manner in their lexicalization pattern, monosyllables included.

When it comes to disyllabic motion verbs, Section 5.2 has shown that the two syllables are in different relations, and those of the [Motion + Path + Manner] pattern are no exception. Table 18 illustrates some representative cases.

It can be seen from Table 18 that the motion verbs bearing features of equipollently-framed languages are the outcome of various manners of compounding, when the component morphemes contribute either Path/Manner or both to the disyllabic verb. Since compounding is in the main a process of two monosyllables coming together, disyllabification has thus played a role in generating verbs with the semantic components of both Path and Manner, which also explains to a certain extent the roughly unchanged percentage of this category of motion verbs in modern Chinese irrespective of the sharp drop (from 87.32 to 20.83) of monosyllabic motion verbs of this lexicalization pattern in the evolution process of the language.

All things considered, [Motion + Path + Manner] can be best taken as necessary supplement to the more prevalent lexicalization patterns in Chinese. There is no clearcut division between different language types; what a specific typological category captures is no more than the predominant properties of a language.

5.3.2 A glimpse of motion verb lexicalization in three intervening periods

The research material of the present study represents two ends of a fairly long history of lexical evolution of the Chinese language. To give a touch of dynamicity to this research, we refer to three periodized dictionaries to examine if the trend we have been arguing for is attested in the three time periods, namely the Tang and the Five Dynasties (618–960, henceforth Tang & Five for short), the Song Dynasty (960–1279), and the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). The number of the identified motion verbs is presented in Table 19 in terms of their syllable composition. It can be seen that the proportion of disyllables is the biggest for all three periods, though there is a drop in the Yuan Dynasty. And accompanying the drop of disyllables in the Yuan period is an increase in the monosyllables, 47 or 43.93 % of a total of 107. The change may well be the outcome of the dictionary sources of this period shifting more towards the spoken variety (say the Yuan dramas) than those of the two early periods, which indicates that Talmy’s typology is variety sensitive.

The lexicalization patterns are presented in Table 20, which shows that the general trend is for the Path component to decline and the Manner component to increase over time. Specifically, [Motion + Path] ranks the highest in Tang & Five, but it is taken over by [Motion + Manner] in Song. Though [Motion + Manner] falls to the second place in Yuan, the most prevalent pattern [Motion + Path + Manner], nonetheless, also contains the semantic component Manner. The two bottom lines highlight this overall trend, with “Path total” exceeding “Manner total” in Tang & Five, but exceeded by [Manner total] in the two later periods. The upsurge of Path in the Yuan period can be explained in terms of the fairly large proportion of monosyllabic motion verbs, which are more conservative in the disyllabification process and most probably bear more properties of ancient Chinese. Anyhow, 81.16 (75.85 %), the figure of “Manner total” of Yuan, is prominent enough.

The Path and Manner distribution of the motion verbs located in the three periodized dictionaries is listed in Table 21 in terms of syllable number. In each cell, the figure to the right of the slash is the total of monosyllables/disyllables and that to the left is the number of motion words containing the specific semantic component. It can be seen that in all cases of the disyllables, the distribution of Manner exceeds that of Path; on top of this, the difference increases over time, from 4.50 % in Tang & Five, to 21.67 % in Song and 25.00 % in Yuan. The reverse is true of the monosyllables, except in the case of Song, which may well be a chance error, given the fairly small denominator 6. The results again attest to the conservativeness of monosyllables and the pulling effect of the disyllabification process on the Chinese language towards the satellite-framed end of Talmy’s bipartite language typology.