Research on Chinese Verb-complement Structure Typology from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Talmy (1985,1991, 2000) categorizes the world languages into verb-framed language(with Spanish as the prototype) and satellite-framed language (with English as an exemplar) and holds that Chinese is a strong satellite-framed language.This categorization results in heated controversy over the typological nature of the Chinese language in the field of linguistics.Incorporating the dynamic relationship between the semantic core of Chinese verb-complement structure (i.e., path or change of state) and the agentivity into the method of cutting component proposed by Li (1984), the authors of this paper have developed both visibility licensing and invisibility licensing to deal with the problem concerning the typological category of Chinese, and conclude that Chinese is undoubtedly a type of parallel-framed language.It is claimed that except for agentivity in agentive subjects,both affectedness in patient objects and transitivity in predicate verbs are additional cognitive factors indispensable to identifying the typological category of the Chinese language.