CHARACTERISTICS AND MANIFESTATIONS OF THE LEXICALIZATION FRAMEWORK OF MOTION EVENTS IN CHINESE AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

Motion is one of the most universal phenomena among humans and expressed by different ways in languages. Leonard Talmy (1975, 1985, 1991, 2000), through his long-term studies on various languages’ lexicalization patterns, developed a typological framework of motion events. However, his studies on Chinese are not yet comprehensive and those on Vietnamese are missing. This study aims to fill these gaps in Talmy’s research. Based on natural spoken corpora, this study fully describes the lexicalization patterns of verbs expressing motion events in the modern Vietnamese and Chinese languages, thence the syntactic and semantic differences between them. On that basis, this study develops a lexicalization framework of motion events for both languages.