Putting and Taking Events in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

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, and Narasimhan, 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).