The Lexical semantics of motion verbs 奔, 走, and 跑 in Shanghainese and Mandarin Chinese: implications for theories of verbal meaning

• Published in: Journal of East Asian linguistics 2024-06, Vol.33 (2), p.229-257
• Main Authors: Zhu, Jialei, Yu, Jianrong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chinese; Comparative Linguistics; Japanese; Language and Literature; Linguistics; Social Sciences; Theoretical Linguistics
• ISSN: 0925-8558; 1572-8560
• DOI: 10.1007/s10831-024-09277-x

We examine the motion verbs 奔, 走, and 跑 in Shanghainese and Mandarin Chinese, providing a first detailed investigation of their interpretive properties and distribution in motion and resultative constructions. We further consider their interpretive properties and distribution in light of theories of verbal meaning that postulate that verbs can entail either manner or result but not both and that such entailments determine how the underlying roots of verbs are integrated into event structure templates, or theories where there are no restrictions on how their underlying roots are integrated. Based on the properties of these verbs across Shanghainese and Mandarin, we conclude that entailments of manner and result are not complementary and do not completely determine root distribution in event structure templates, nor is the distribution of roots completely free. Rather, roots themselves must be able to idiosyncratically specify the kinds of interpretations they receive in particular structural contexts and that such structural contexts can be disjoint across languages even for the same conceptual root, which we capture using realizational rules within distributed morphology approaches that view roots as abstract, syntactic placeholders whose phonological pronunciations and semantic interpretations are specified only within the structural contexts they are embedded in.