热点聚焦 | 认知语言学视角下的事件语法研究
导语
事件语法研究事件在语言表征和语言认知中的作用。事件语法的基本主张为：从语言现象本身研究语言，无法触及语言的本质；深入研究语言问题，必须首先深入研究事件。事件语法研究涵盖共时层面的事件表征、事件范畴化研究，和历时层面的事件融合、事件语法化研究。研究方法包括视频实验法和基于语料库的研究方法，统计手段主要为多维变量统计方法。
本期栏目聚焦认知语言学视角下的事件语法研究，邀请李福印教授的研究团队分享最新研究成果。李福印教授以Talmy的二分法类型学为研究背景，基于汉语动趋式，从历时视角论述了事件融合和语法化，并提出宏事件假说。邓宇教授利用脑电诱发反应电位，研究自然语言理解过程中虚构运动事件和真实运动事件的加工过程及认知神经机制。任龙波副教授分析了英汉两种语言在表征空间静态事件时所涉及的空间概念化过程，并阐述了这两种语言在表征该类事件时的类型学特征。李金妹副教授提出了事件融合的四维模型，用以描述不同语言的使用者如何识解并用语言表征具有不同复杂性的事件。基于此事件融合模型，作者使用实验诱导法和对比分析法，以汉语使用者和英语使用者为实验对象，研究初始因果链和持续因果链的事件融合问题。靳俊杰副教授采用多重对应分析、条件推理决策树和随机森林等方法探究了“V着”连用式两个槽位动词的原型时间特性，预测了两个“着”的体意义并讨论了持续性、动态性、终结性、有界性及槽位等对识别动词情状体类型的重要性。
沈煜博士研究了中古译经专书《鼻奈耶》中“取”字处置式的语法关系，认为该经的“取”字处置式（“取+[N]+VP”）属于汉语早期处置式，但“取”后的名词N大多可以看成谓语动词VP的主语（更宜叫话题），而不是以往认为的VP的提前宾语，也不必把处置式笼统看成完全特殊的构式。这种语法关系符合本土汉语基本结构，即话题-说明结构（或叫对言格式）。李天宇博士以汉语综合性动词对“方式/结果互补假说”再度证伪，并论述了该类动词对于认知类型学的意义。杜静博士从跨语言研究视角，探讨了分离类状态变化事件在汉语、俄语和韩语中的范畴化，指出事件范畴化受语言类型、词汇多样性、概念凸显性以及事件识解和类型等多重因素共同制约。徐萌敏博士探究了制约汉语处所交替的概率性影响因素，运用条件随机森林和混合逻辑斯蒂回归建模，考察了汉语处所交替中两种构式转换使用的语境条件。刘娜博士梳理了汉语词汇“使”的语义演变历程，尤其解释了“使”作动词时在演变过程中呈现的事件语义融合现象，证实了“宏事件假说”。
——中国科学院大学 高原
Extending the Talmyan Typology: A Case Study of the Macro-Event as Event Integration and Grammaticalization in Mandarin
李福印，香港中文大学博士，北京航空航天大学二级教授、博导，国际期刊Cognitive Semantics主编。研究方向为：认知语言学、事件语法等。
摘要
The two-way typology proposed by Leonard Talmy has been extremely influential in the past few decades, and has led to a large number of publications. But while the majority of the literature is devoted to the identification of the verb-framed or satellite-framed status of individual languages, relatively little (if any) research focuses on the foundation of this theory. This article addresses the nature of the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology, proposing a diachronic aspect of the macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-event results from the integration of two simpler events through grammaticalization in Mandarin. This hypothesis is supported by the behavior of directional complements in Mandarin Chinese in that these directional complements in combination with the main verbs can express all the five types of the macro-events that Talmy has analyzed to establish his typology, and that these macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simpler events and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization. This study brings together two seemingly unrelated areas of research, that is, the area of event structure and that of grammaticalization, thus providing a new perspective on the Talmyan typological paradigm. The result, though supported by the data in Mandarin Chinese, might have universal value and implications for other languages as well.
摘自：Li, Thomas fuyin. 2018. Extending the Talmyan typology: A case study of the macro-event as event integration and grammaticalization in Mandarin. Cognitive Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2016-0050
To Move or not to Move: An ERP Study on the Processing of Fictive and Literal Motion Expressions
邓宇，北京航空航天大学博士，四川外国语大学教授、硕士生导师。研究方向：认知神经语言学、语言病理学。
摘要
This study used electroencephalographic evoked response potentials to investigate the processing of fictive motion and literal motion during natural language comprehension. A hypothesis is that the motion component of a verb is preserved in both literal and fictive motion constructions (‘The army/The bridge crossed the river’). However, the incorporation of a motion-event frame into fictive motion constructions requires reanalysis or reconstruction both syntactically and semantically. Comparing fictive motion constructions to literal motion constructions revealed a larger P300 at presentation of the subject noun phrase, a larger P600 at motion verbs, and an N400 modulation on the sentence-final complement noun phrases. These results suggest that the processing of fictive motion requires increased cognitive effort relative to literal motion condition, particularly computations related to thematic role assignment and semantic unification to construct a motion-event frame involving mental simulation of motion.
摘自：Deng Yu & Zhu Huili. 2020. To move or not to move: An ERP study on the processing of fictive and literal motion expressions. Lingua, 244, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102908
《认知语义学：静态事件的概念化和类型学》
任龙波，北京航空航天大学博士，河南科技大学副教授、硕士生导师，研究方向：认知语言学、认知语义学、商务英语教学。
内容简介
This study intends to investigate the conceptualization and typology of spatial stationary events from the perspective of cognitive semantics. Leonard Talmy (2000b: 222) states that, both English and Chinese are satellite-framed languages (S-language), which is called the Talmyan S-language hypothesis of English and Chinese. Spatial stationary events are what Talmy termed locatedness (Talmy 2000b: 25). The conceptualization and typology of spatial stationary events is seldom touched upon in the research of motion events which are the prototype of macro-events (Talmy 2000b, 2016, 2017b; Li 2018, 2020; Ren 2021; Li & Liu 2022). The main purpose of this study is to analyze conceptualization process of this type of events. The methodology here is qualitative analyses followed by empirical research. This study collects linguistic data by elicitation experiments using the stimuli: BowPed Series and PosB series. By using these two series, twenty-six Chinese native speakers and six English native speakers are interviewed. And both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted with the elicited data. A significant part of stationary events, according to our research, are mainly expressed by locative expressions such as spatial adpositions and positional verbs.
摘自：任龙波，2023，《认知语义学：静态事件的概念化和类型学》。广州：暨南大学出版社。
《因果关系事件语义学：事件融合视角》
李金妹，荷兰阿姆斯特丹自由大学-北京航空航天大学双博士，天津师范大学副教授、硕士生导师。主要研究方向：认知语义学、应用认知语言学、英语教学。
内容简介
Talmy (1976) proposes that there are two different temporal relations between a causing event and its caused event. Onset causation occurs if a caused event begins after the causing event, while extended causation occurs if a caused event happened simultaneously with the causing event. Li argues that in this book onset causation and extended causation are two subtypes of direct causation. It is recognized that both an onset causal chain and an extended causal chain can be conceptualized as a macro-event. Li sets forth a new theoretical model of how speakers of various languages verbalize events having varying degrees of internal complexity – a four-dimensional model for event integration, which is a new method for investigating the language-thought interface by analyzing participants’ conceptualization and lexicalization patterns of dynamic events. This four-dimensional model falls into two parts: conceptual event integration and syntactic integration. Conceptually, four dimensions determining which events can be conceptualized as an integrated macro-event are identified, including spatial and/or temporal integration, participant integration, event-type integration and relation integration. Syntactically, the morphosyntactic counterpart proposed as realizing conceptual event integration is the monoclausal construction derived from multiple clauses.
Based on this event integration model, taking English and Mandarin speakers as research subjects, Li employs an elicitation experiment and contrastive analysis to explore the event integration of onset and extended causal chains, investigating the effects of the temporal variable and the presence of an instrument or not on speakers’ event-number classifications and syntactic encodings of onset causal chains and extended causal chains. This book explores whether there is any difference in the mapping from the conceptual event integration to syntactic integration between extended causal chains and onset causal chains within and between Mandarin Chinese and English. The research focuses on four kinds of isolated instances of causal chains: instrumental onset causal chains (I＋OCC), non-instrumental onset causal chains (I－OCC), instrumental extended causal chains (I＋ECC) and non-instrumental extended causal chains (I－ECC).
摘自：李金妹，2021，《因果关系事件语义学：事件融合视角》。广州：暨南大学出版社。
A Multifactorial Aspectual Analysis of Verb Concatenation with Imperfective Markers Zhe in Mandarin
靳俊杰，北京航空航天大学博士，江苏海洋大学外国语学院副教授、硕士生导师。研究兴趣为认知语义学、词汇历时变异、对比修辞学、语料库语言学等。
摘要
As a cognitive ability to construe events in alternate ways, aspectuality has aroused many researchers’ academic attention; however, the concatenation of aspect markers in a clause is understudied in previous studies. The present paper follows a bidimensional approach of aspect to conduct a corpus-based aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe (henceforth VCIMs zhe) in Mandarin. Specifically, to construe the cognitive inference mechanism of aspect, a multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe by the statistical techniques of multiple correspondence analysis, conditional inference trees and conditional random forests is carried out to explore the prototypical temporal features of verbs in two slots, predict the aspectual meanings of two imperfective markers zhe, and also discuss the conditional importance of factors such as durativity, dynamicity, telicity, boundedness, and slot in identifying the situation types of two verbs or verb phrases in VCIMs zhe. Methodologically, a usage-based multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe complements previous introspective studies on aspect marking. Theoretically, a corpus-based aspectual account of VCIMs zhe, one type of complex viewpoint aspects, expands traditional studies on Chinese aspect system, supplies evidence for aspect typology cross-linguistically, and provides reference for second language acquisition of usage patterns of zhe by non-native speakers.
摘自：Junjie Jin & Fuyin Thomas Li. 2023. A multifactorial aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe in Mandarin. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0080.
Preliminary Study of the Qu(取) Disposal Constructions in Binaiye(鼻奈耶) and Its Related Issue about Grammatical Relations
沈煜，中国社科院博士，北京航空航天大学博士后，浙江大学国际教育学院讲师，研究方向：汉语史、语法学、国际中文教育。
摘要
The Qu disposal constructions (“取+[N]+VP”) in Binaiye are types of early disposal constructions in Chinese history, but most N after Qu can be analysed as the subject (better called as topic) of VP, rather than the moved object of VP. It is also unnecessary to consider this structure as a special less-compositional construction roughly. In general, this grammatical relation still conforms to the basic structure of Chinese, which is the topic-comment structure (also called dui-pattern). However, “取+N+杀/弑” is the most special Qu disposal construction in Binaiye. Considering its structural features and distribution in other translated Middle Chinese Buddhist sutras, with the language background and translation ideas (and also translation attitudes) of those translators, we can suggest that “取+N+杀/弑” be mainly a personal translation strategy of Zhu Fonian(竺佛念), and also be interfered by the OV word order in the target language.
摘自：Shen, Yu. 2022. Preliminary study of the Qu(取) disposal constructions in Binaiye(鼻奈耶) and its related issue about grammatical relations. Studies on Historical Linguistics (17): 32-46.
Chinese Synthetic Verbs: A Further Challenge to Manner/Result Complementarity Hypothesis on the Basis of Lexical Root Meaning Analysis
李天宇，北京电子科技学院讲师。研究方向：认知类型学，汉语本体研究。
摘要
This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs, and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb + result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and awaits further investigation.
摘自：Li, Tianyu. 2023. Chinese synthetic verbs: A further challenge to manner/result complementarity hypothesis on the basis of lexical root meaning analysis. Cognitive Linguistics. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cog-2021-0121/html
Separation Events in Mandarin, Russian and Korean: A Crosslinguistic Event-Categorization Study
杜静，北京航空航天大学博士，中国科学院大学外语系讲师。研究兴趣为认知语义学、历时语言学、语料库语言学等。
摘要
Crosslinguistic studies on motion events have revealed that S-languages demonstrate finer-grained lexical categories than V-languages in representing motion manners/gaits. But these studies were restricted to the semantic domain of motion events and confined to a limited number of S- or V- languages. In this paper, we further investigate whether the association between lexical diversity and language typology is manifest in a similar way in the semantic domain of separation events by focusing on Mandarin, Russian and Korean. Our results suggest that: (1) Separation expressions support the diversity-typology correlation proved in motion expressions because the two S-languages Mandarin and Russian demonstrate richer lexical diversity than the V-language Korean; (2) It is further pointed out that apart from language typology, lexical diversity is influenced by multiple factors including lexical resources, conceptual salience, event construal, and event type; (3) Though typologically different, these three languages, in their lexical naming of separation events, are constrained by the biomechanical structure and follow the principle of prototypicality. Overall, this study opens up a new crosslinguistic perspective by showing how lexical diversity is typologically and linguistically driven.
摘自：Du, Jing, Li Fuyin, Ge Yanlei, Zhang Jinkai. 2023. Separation events in Mandarin, Russian and Korean: A crosslinguistic event-categorization study. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00143.du
Modeling the Locative Alternation in Mandarin Chinese — A Corpus-Based Study
徐萌敏，北京航空航天大学博士，中国石油大学（北京）讲师。研究兴趣为认知语义学、认知社会语言学、语料库语言学等。
摘要
The current study investigates the probabilistic conditioning of the Mandarin locative alternation. We adopt a corpus-based multivariate approach to analyze 2,836 observations of locative variants from a large Chinese corpus and annotated manually for various language-internal and language-external constraints. Multivariate modeling reveals that the Mandarin locative alternation is not only influenced by semantic predictors like affectedness and telicity, but also by previously unexplored syntactic and language-external constraints, such as complexity and animacy of locatum and location, accessibility of locatum, pronominality, definiteness of location, length ratio and register. Notably, the effects of affectedness, definiteness and pronominality are broadly parallel in both the Mandarin locative alternation and its English counterpart. We thus contribute to theorizing in corpus-based variationist linguistics by uncovering the probabilistic grammar of the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese, and by identifying the constraints that may be universal across languages.
摘自：Xu, Mengmin, Li Fuyin, Szmrecsanyi Benedikt. 2024. Modeling the locative alternation in Mandarin Chinese — A corpus-based study. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22072.xu
Event Integration as a Driving Force of Language Change: Evidence from Chinese使-Shǐ-Make
刘娜，北京航空航天大学博士，主要研究方向为认知语言学。
摘要
Talmy’s (1991, 2000a, 2000b) influential work on motion events provides a strong two-way typology that can examine and account for the typology of a language, but this framework is basically synchronic. It may not be equally valid to explain language change. In this paper, we apply the event integration theory and its latest development, The Macro-event Hypothesis (Li 2020, 2023), to account for the development of the causative verb 使-shǐ-make (SHI for short) in Chinese. This study reveals that, firstly, the multi-functional behavior of SHI represents a typical case of grammaticalization, with a full verb acquiring the role of conjunction and expressing abstract meanings. Secondly, the semantic division of the causative and non-causative uses of SHI in Contemporary Chinese is the most clear-cut. Thirdly, causative SHI shows a greater level of semantic bleaching, and the construction profiles a single causal activity and has a higher degree of event integration when compared to its lexical verbal use. The constructional grammaticalization of SHI confirms that event integration is key to its development. This study verifies The Macro-event Hypothesis of a continuum of grammaticalization in language and uncovers the process of semantic gradation that takes place in Chinese.
摘自：Liu, Na., & Li, Fuyin. 2023. Event integration as a driving force of language change: Evidence from Chinese使-shǐ-make. Language and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.36
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