Event Segmentation and Causation: The Case of Mandarin Causal‐Chain Motion

This study investigates how Mandarin speakers segment causal‐chain motion events in a verbalization task. The results demonstrate that Mandarin shows attentional bias for the causal source and goal in causal‐chain segmentation, which may be universal across languages. Furthermore, there is a correla...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studia linguistica 2023-08, Vol.77 (2), p.368-415
Main Authors: Deng, Yu, Li, Fuyin Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Causative constructions
Causative verbs
Ewe
Japanese language
Kra-Dai languages
Linguistic complexity
Mandarin
Motion
Periphrasis
Segmentation
Syntactic structures
Yucatec Maya language
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Summary:This study investigates how Mandarin speakers segment causal‐chain motion events in a verbalization task. The results demonstrate that Mandarin shows attentional bias for the causal source and goal in causal‐chain segmentation, which may be universal across languages. Furthermore, there is a correlation between directness of causation and the complexity of linguistic representations, with direct conceptualization leading to a preference for simpler constructions (e.g. causative verb construction, resultative verb construction), and indirect causation for more complex representations (e.g. causative periphrases and multi‐macro‐event constructions). The most salient factor for directness of causation in causal‐chain segmentation is spatio‐temporal contiguity. The macro‐event property (MEP) is used to test the tightness of Mandarin causative constructions from a typological perspective. It is concluded that Mandarin demonstrates greater similarity with Ewe and Lao, but differs from Japanese and Yukatek regarding grammatical integration and event integration in causal‐chain segmentation.
ISSN:0039-3193
1467-9582
DOI:10.1111/stul.12211