Mandarin Speakers’ Conceptualization of Force and Motion in the Semantics of Pull Verbs of Hand Action in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This is an exploration of Mandarin speakers’ conceptualization of the semantic features that form the notions of Force and Motion in the Pull Verbs of Hand Action such as la 拉, tuo 拖, and zhuai 拽 in Mandarin Chinese. A corpus-based analysis was first conducted to reveal the salient semantic features embedded in the verbs. Then, adult native Mandarin speakers (N = 40) were administered a preference scale test as a measure of semantic salience based on action-provoked reasoning. The results show that the corpus-based data revealed the major semantic features of the verbs from their contextual meanings, while the native speakers’ verbal descriptions of the verb semantics based on the action-provoked reasoning focused largely on the force in relation to the objective patient involved and motion direction in relation to the subjective agent’s action. This indicates that the notions of Force, Motion, and Motion Direction are the base for L1 speakers to conceptualize the lexical semantics of the Pull Verbs and that Motion Direction is the condition for the distinction of the members of the class of Pull Verbs that are near-synonyms.