A Study of Pattern Path Expressions in Mandarin Chinese From the Perspective of Motion Event Typology

Given that pattern paths, one type of fictive motion, have been understudied so far, this paper examines pattern path expressions from the perspective of motion event typology. Through manually collecting Mandarin pattern path data from books and magazines, we first explored the semantic elements in pattern path expressions with a focus on the Figure and the Ground, and then investigated their lexicalization pattern by studying the grammatical slots encoding the Path, the semantic elements integrated in the verb, the expression of manner information, and the complexity of Ground information. The results showed that, in Mandarin pattern path expressions, typical semantic elements include the Figure, the Ground, the Motion, the Path, and the Cause, among which Figural entities are usually large-scale geographical or architectural entities, and the Ground is often left out linguistically; second, the Path is encoded in both the verb and the satellite, but more frequently in the verb; third, the number of manner verbs is low in both type and token while that of path verbs is high, and accordingly, alternative expressions of manner information usually modify path verbs rather than manner verbs. Our findings suggest that pattern path expressions are an economical way to express the state change of large-scale entities and that Mandarin Chinese behaves more like a V-language when expressing pattern paths.