The Linguistic Representations of Causing Events and Caused Events in Narrative Discourse

Abstract

This article examines Talmyan claims on the order, linguistic form, and Figure/Ground alignment of causing events and caused events. Narratives are elicited from a set of 20 video clips of real situations. 50 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were interviewed to set up a closed corpus of 1000 causative sentences. It is found that the data fell into three major types: the causing events are represented prior to the caused event; the caused events are specified initially in bei-construction; the caused events appear independently. The results suggest that Talmyan claims about the morphosyntactic features of causative expressions are not universal. The patterns in which causal events are described appear to be language specific and context dependent. It is hypothesized that causative expressions are best characterized in terms of continuums: the continuum of causative constructions; the continuum of causative elements; the continuum of causing event; and the continuum of caused events.