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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

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

Authors : Meichun Liu, Jui-Ching Chang

Published in: Chinese Lexical Semantics

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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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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previous chapter A Corpus-Based Study on the Semantic Prosody of Quasi-Affix “Zu”

next chapter A Study on Lexical Ambiguity in Mandarin Chinese

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.

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.

The verb

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‘stand’ is originally a verb of human posture and can also be used to denote placement as in

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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’ (*

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He stood up.’).

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

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].

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Title: Placement Verbs in Chinese and English: Language-Specific Lexicalization Patterns
Authors: Meichun Liu
Jui-Ching Chang
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Chinese Lexical Semantics
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_38

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