Fictive Motion in Chinese

Abstract

This thesis studies fictive motion expressions in Modern Standard Chinese. A fictive motion expression describes a static physical entity using dynamic linguistic forms. The fictive motion sentences are manually collected from published books and magazines mainly with those with geography and travelling as the main topic. The data are categorized based on Talmy‘s categorization system, after which the established types of fictive motion are analysed from the perspectives of motion event theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Specifically speaking, the established types of fictive motion are examined in terms of the participants involved, the semantic elements encoded in the verbs, and possible metaphors structuring fictive motion. It is found that in addition to the established types of fictive motion identified by Talmy, some new types also exist. These new types of fictive motion are demonstrated and their relationship with the established types is discussed. The entities designated by the linguistic Figure in fictive motion are setting-like entities and thus are more like the perceptual Ground. The Figure-Ground organization is unique in fictive motion expressions to the extent that, in some cases, the linguistic Figure and Ground are reversed compared to the prototypical perceptual Figure-Ground organization. The semantic elements expressed by the verbs include the path information, manner information, and general motion information. Some verbal predicate patterns in fictive motion come from ancient Chinese, which, together with the rough negative correlation between the proportion of ancient verbal predicate patterns and that of manner verbs, leads to the hypothesis that fictive motion expressions may occur more in verb-framed languages. With regard to metaphors, three specific domains are observed to be frequently used in fictive motion expressions, i.e., the animal domain, liquid domain and force domain. Naïve physics and human-scale understanding are employed to explain the seeming conflict between Conceptual Metaphor Theory and fictive motion, namely, why entities in the fundamental domains (the perceptual domain and spatial domain) are structured and expressed through other domains.