The Order of Mandarin Chinese Motion Morphemes and the "Scalar Specificity Constraint"

This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin multi-morpheme motion constructions (e.g., tui-hui recede-return). It classifies Chinese motion morphemes into three major types and proposes a “Scalar Specificity Constraint” to account for the order in multi-morpheme motion constructions. The constraint not only provides a better coverage of the data of Chinese motion constructions from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface, but also illuminates the distribution of motion verbs in other serial verb languages.