Putting and Taking Events in Mandarin Chinese

The first verb (V1) of the verb compound, na2 ‘take’, encodes the general action of removing, the second verb (V2), xia4 ‘descend’, encodes the Path of motion, and the third verb (V3), lai2 ‘come’, indicates Deictic information (i.e. towards the Agent in [1]). Verb compounds like na2-xia4-lai2 are known as directional verb compounds, which typically describe motion events and involve a verb indicating the Path of motion. This paper investigates the lexical semantics of Mandarin placement predicates from the perspective of event encoding and event categorization. The data explored in this study are the verbs used in elicited descriptions of 63 Put&Take video clips (Bowerman, Gullberg, Majid, andNarasimhan, 2004) plus three warm-up items, depicting a wide range of caused putting and taking events by 10 adult native speakers of Mandarin (mean age 28 years). In §2, I give an overview of the grammatical encoding of the semantic components of a placement event in a clause – Figure, Ground, Motion, and Path. In §3, I discuss the lexical semantics of verb compounds and their component verbs. I