A Corpus-Based Study of “V + Dào” Constructions as Temporal Contouring Events in Mandarin

Abstract

The temporal contouring event is a hot topic in Talmy’s linguistic typology, and the “V + Dào” construction is one of the prototypes of Chinese compliments with its typological disputes, which lie in its event integration patterns. According to the corpus-based and correlational analysis of “V + Dào” constructions as temporal contouring events in Mandarin, this paper aims to explore their event integration patterns and reveal their event integration degrees in terms of event semantics, and syntactic properties. The research results are found that: IEI_V can conflate 2 conceptual primitives;  IEI_D consists of two conceptual primitives; EEI_VD contains 2 combinations of IEI_V and IEI_D, which can be formularized as “2+2”;  the value of EEI_Type refers to the verb-phase construction (VPha); the hierarchy of correlated variables in IEI_V and IEI_D is ranked as “(ActiPro > AssoFun) > (SynType_VD > SynTyp_X) > (FigEnt_Anim)”; Chin_VD is only weakly correlated with SynType_VD and SynTyp_X. This study can provide insights to reveal the lexicalization and grammaticalization processes of “V + Dào” construction or even the verb complement construction in Mandarin.