The Order of Mandarin Chinese Motion Morphemes and the "Scalar Specificity Constraint"

Jingxia Lin
2011 Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation  
This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin multi-morpheme motion constructions (e.g., tui-hui recede-return). It classifies Chinese motion morphemes into three major types and proposes a "Scalar Specificity Constraint" to account for the order in multi-morpheme motion constructions. The constraint not only provides a better coverage of the data of Chinese motion constructions from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface, but also
more » ... luminates the distribution of motion verbs in other serial verb languages.
dblp:conf/paclic/Lin11 fatcat:r4tmgjjcbbhulg3dnhdg4wvhqe