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Placement Verbs in Chinese and English: Language-Specific Lexicalization Patterns

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

This study aims to show that language-specific distinctions of lexicalization patterns are crucial to verbal semantic studies by examining the differences of Placement verbs in English and Chinese. It argues that cross-linguistic transference of lexical knowledge should not be made without a detailed analysis of seemingly corresponding verbs in different languages. It also probes into the long-debated issue on how languages conceptualize a common event type with distinct lexical and grammatical realizations. By conducting a contrastive study of the lexicalization patterns of placement verbs in Chinese and English, it is proposed that, while a placing event is conceptually universal in taking the basic semantic components of Agent, Theme, Location, and Path, placement verbs in Chinese and English vary in their lexical origins, level of specificity and morpho-semantic subtypes. It is shown that placement verbs are lexicalized and categorized in language-specific ways that have typological implications. Ultimately, the study sheds new light on class-specific, cross-linguistic comparisons.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is still debatable among scholars about the specific framing type Chinese belongs to. Counter to Slobin’s [13] proposal that Chinese is equipollently-framed, Talmy [9] classified Chinese as a satellite-framed language, taking the path markers in Chinese as ‘prepositions’. However, Tai [10], based on the fact that Chinese resultative complement is verb-rooted, argued that Chinese is primarily verb-framed and only secondarily satellite-framed. See the references cited above for details of discussion.

  2. 2.

    Note that English put is not derived from posture verb but from putten ‘push’ in Middle English and therefore it can be viewed as also a movement-based placement verb. In this sense, English is slightly different from other Germanic languages in which the posture-based pattern is adopted predominantly.

  3. 3.

    The verb ‘stand’ is originally a verb of human posture and can also be used to denote placement as in stood the book on the table.’ But as an archaic form, it is less prototypical as a posture verb since it cannot be used to denote ‘assuming posture’ (* He stood up.’).

  4. 4.

    http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/.

  5. 5.

    Not all languages show the differences between ‘light verbs’ vs. ‘heavy verbs’ in placement. For example, Tzeltal, a Maya language, has been reported habitually using more than sixty lexicons in denoting various types of placement events in terms of the spatial-configurational states and therefore is argued as a language without light verb [25].

  6. 6.

    Chinese Gigaword is a corpus of 1.4 billion words (https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc2011t13)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Meichun Liu & Jui-Ching Chang

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  1. Meichun Liu
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  2. Jui-Ching Chang
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Correspondence to Meichun Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

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Liu, M., Chang, JC. (2018). Placement Verbs in Chinese and English: Language-Specific Lexicalization Patterns. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_38

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