Which way to move: The evolution of motion expressions in Chinese

This paper re-examines from an evolutionary perspective the typological status of Chinese, with regard to the issue of how the information of motion events is encoded (Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). We investigate, with emphasis on the roles of both language structure and language use, the four periods of Chinese (Old, Middle, Pre-Modern and Modern) in terms of parameters such as path, manner and ground, and compare with typologically different languages, namely, verb-framed languages like Spanish and satellite-framed languages like English. Our statistical study shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language, and Pre-Modern Chinese is a stepped-up period with respect to the speed of evolution; (ii) Modern Chinese adopts diverse patterns to encode motion events, which are different from both typical verb-framed languages and typical satellite-framed languages. We thus conclude that (i) contrary to Peyraube’s (2006) claim, the typological shift in Chinese has not yet been achieved; (ii) there is little justification for classifying Chinese as an equipollently framed language as in Slobin (2004) and Chen and Guo (2009). Therefore, there is no need to posit an equipollent type for Chinese; and (iii) Modern Chinese is in a transitional state from a V-type to an S-type due to the evolution of its motion expressions. It also favors the S-type in both its morphosyntactic properties and language use.