Macro-events in Verb–verb Compounds from the Perspective of Baseline and Elaboration: Iconicity in Typology and Grammaticalization

Abstract

In Talmy’s typology of event integration, macro-events are classified into five types (motion, temporal contouring, state change, action correlating, and realization) by the framing event. Examining compound verbs representing macro-events cross-linguistically, this paper argues that macro-events can be classified into two types from the viewpoint of “elaboration” (Langacker 2016): augmentation (motion, state change, and realization) and adaptation (temporal contouring and action correlating). Based on iconicity, compound verbs can be said to be the best candidates for encoding conceptually integrated complex events considering their high lexical integrity. This paper shows that the two types of macro-events in compound verbs are distinct in the order of the framing event and the co-event, the representation of the framing event, and their lexical integrity. These results suggest that the differences in baseline/elaboration organization iconically emerge as explicit differences in linguistic forms, indicating the validity of the “iconicity of structured mapping in compounds”.