Iconic sequencing of motional progression in Mandarin Chinese

Motion verbs in Mandarin Chinese have been a major focus of interest in recent decades. However, while many studies have shown the semantic/syntactic characteristics of motion verbs, few attentions have been given to the fact that whether a basic picture constrain for motion verbs in Mandarin Chinese. In this paper, as motion verbs consist of certain semantic components, which are Manner, Path, Direction, Endpoint, Locus, and Deictic, and these components, we take an iconic consideration to integrate the issue of motion verbs, and our collected data from corpus exhibit an iconic sequencing of motion verbs that realizes a natural progression of motion events in Mandarin Chinese. Under this progression, the morphemes of motion verbs can be considered an implicational hierarchy that may imply one or more semantic components, which reflect on particular semantic attributes, such as 回 ‘to come back’, which implies Path and Direction, and 翻 ’to turn over’, which bears the components of Manner and Path. By considering the semantic components, Manner verbs mean the way in which a figure carries out a motion, such as 飛 ‘to fly’, to show the way of the motion. Path verbs mean the trajectory over which a figure moves to another object, such as 移 ‘to move’. Direction means whether a motion verb shows fixed direction or not, and no words in Chinese represent only the component of Direction. Endpoint is a stop at a certain position, such as 到 ‘to arrive’, 至 ‘to arrive’, or 臨 ‘be near’. A verb may include one or more elements, such as 飛 ‘to fly’ including only Manner, or 進 ‘to go in’ including Direction + Endpoint. If we assume that a given meaning of a word can be attributed to its syntactic behaviors (Talmy 1985, 2000), the grammatical relevance as a piece of evidence that defines the status of each semantic component, and the order of motion verbs are constrained by the iconic principle.