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This paper reports on a corpus-based study aimed at reexamining the typological status and diachronic change of motion expressions in Chinese, drawing on parallel texts consisting of autonomous motion expressions in Old Chinese (OC) and its Modern Chinese (MoC) translation. The results show that MoC significantly differs from OC both in the preference of lexicalization patterns (Talmyan typology) and semantic components distributed in discourse (Slobinian typology) when narrating similar motion scenes. However, these results fail to support the viewpoint that Chinese has undergone a change from a verb- to a satellite-frame (Li 1993; Talmy 2000; Peyraube 2006; Shi & Wu 2014). It is argued that (i) the Talmyan typology and the Slobinian typology should be treated separately. In Talmyan typology, the diachrony of Chinese demonstrates the change of a V- to a parallel-frame, in that satellite- and verb-framed constructions in MoC have equal frequency and show no bias for the encoding of subtypes of autonomous motion. In Slobinian typology, MoC remains as a Path-salient language, as it gives considerable weight to the expression of Path; (ii) the dominant lexicalization pattern in a language varies from one sub-domain of motion to another (see also Lamarre 2003), and thus the typology of motion expressions is sub-domain-specific; and (iii) motivating forces and blocking forces, furthermore, co-exist diachronically for the typological evolution of motion encoding due to the idiosyncrasy of the morphosyntactic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines from an evolutionary perspective the typological status of Chinese, with regard to the issue of how the information of motion events is encoded (Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). We investigate, with emphasis on the roles of both language structure and language use, the four periods of Chinese (Old, Middle, Pre-Modern and Modern) in terms of parameters such as path, manner and ground, and compare with typologically different languages, namely, verb-framed languages like Spanish and satellite-framed languages like English. Our statistical study shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language, and Pre-Modern Chinese is a stepped-up period with respect to the speed of evolution; (ii) Modern Chinese adopts diverse patterns to encode motion events, which are different from both typical verb-framed languages and typical satellite-framed languages. We thus conclude that (i) contrary to Peyraube's (2006) claim, the typological shift in Chinese has not yet been achieved; (ii) there is little justification for classifying Chinese as an equipollently framed language as in Slobin (2004) and Chen and Guo (2009). Therefore, there is no need to posit an equipollent type for Chinese; and (iii) Modern Chinese is in a transitional state from a V-type to an S-type due to the evolution of its motion expressions. It also favors the S-type in both its morphosyntactic properties and language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]