Abstract
This work addresses a contrast in the encoding pattern of two kinds of events of caused change in Mandarin Chinese. Caused change of state events are typically expressed with a resultative verb compound, while caused change of location and caused motion events may be expressed with a monomorphemic verb. I argue that this asymmetry arises from two factors. One is a requirement in Mandarin that monomorphemic verbs of causation be agentive, which reflects a prototypical association between causers and volitional agents. The second is an ontological distinction between change of state and change of location. Changes of state may arise spontaneously without an external cause for any kind of individual. In contrast, change of location for one kind of entity – inanimates – requires the mediation of an external agent.
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Notes
- 1.
Abbreviations used: 1, 3 = 1st, 3rd person; acc = accusative; cl = classifier; past.part = past participle; perf = perfective; pl = plural; prog = progressive; refl = reflexive.
- 2.
These compound verbs are formed from two COS verbs, unlike typical RVCs, which contain an activity verb describing the causing event and a COS (or potentially stative) predicate, which describes the result.
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Acknowledgments
This work was based in part on work supported by grant no. GS031-A-15 from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and on work supported by a grant (WBS no. R-102-000-113-133) from the National University of Singapore. I thank Liu Mei-chun, Lin Jingxia, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as other participants of CLSW 2018 for helpful comments, not all of which I have been able to address. Thanks also go to Ng Xinyi for help with proofreading. All errors and misinterpretations are my responsibility.
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Tham, S.W. (2018). External Causation and Agentivity in Mandarin Chinese. 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_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_5
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