The Windowing and Shifting of Attention of Motion Verbs in the Path Event Frame: A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study between 去 ( qù , go) and “go” in Chinese and English

Abstract

The path event frame reveals the structure of typical motion events. 去 ( qù , go) and “go”, as a pair of typical path verbs, imply clear and discernible paths in their meanings. Therefore, this study concerns itself with a corpus-based endeavor to detect 去 ( qù , go) and “go” under the rubric of the path event frame and the Windowing of Attention Theory, and the study focuses on the questions below: 1) What are the path selections of 去 ( qù , go) and “go”? 2) What is the distribution of modes of attention windowing? 3) What are the factors shifting attention windowing? The findings are: 1) Both English and Chinese tend to give priority to the type of open path with 去 ( qù , go) accounting for 82.6% and “go” accounting for 81.3%. Types of closed and fictive path share a comparatively small proportion of the overall data. 2) 去 ( qù , go) and “go” show a common preference toward windowing the final portion along the path, which denotes that both languages tend to foreground destinations of the path. In addition, the other 6 mode complexes all appear in the Chinese data with only a small proportion for each mode. Comparatively, modes of I, M, M + F, I + F, and I + M + F show up in English data in different numbers except for the mode of I + M with none appearance in the overall data. 3) Factors working to shift attention windowing include tense restriction, satellite coercion, and verbal inertia. The research expects to reveal the universal cognitive pattern behind 去 ( qù , go) and “go”, validate the Windowing of Attention Theory across two languages, and complement the introspective research with a corpus-based method.