Event Segmentation and Causation: The Case of Mandarin Causal‐Chain Motion*

Abstract

AbstractThis study investigates how Mandarin speakers segment causal‐chain motion events in a verbalization task. The results demonstrate that Mandarin shows attentional bias for the causal source and goal in causal‐chain segmentation, which may be universal across languages. Furthermore, there is a correlation between directness of causation and the complexity of linguistic representations, with direct conceptualization leading to a preference for simpler constructions (e.g. causative verb construction, resultative verb construction), and indirect causation for more complex representations (e.g. causative periphrases and multi‐macro‐event constructions). The most salient factor for directness of causation in causal‐chain segmentation is spatio‐temporal contiguity. The macro‐event property (MEP) is used to test the tightness of Mandarin causative constructions from a typological perspective. It is concluded that Mandarin demonstrates greater similarity with Ewe and Lao, but differs from Japanese and Yukatek regarding grammatical integration and event integration in causal‐chain segmentation.