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The Physical Foundation of Language

Helena Gao

23 Nov. 2005 Lecture 9

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Required readings:•  • Birdwhistell, R. L. (1975). Background considerations to the

study of the body as medium of expression. In J. Benthall (ed.), The Body as a medium of expression. Allen Lane. Pengiun Books Ltd. pp. 36-58

• Gao, H. (2001). The physical foundation of the patterning of physical action verbs. Lund University Press. Chapter 5: Combinability of Physical Action VV Compounds. pp. 111-126

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Recommended readings:• Birdwhistell, R. L. (1970). Kinesics and Context. Essays on

body motion communication. University of Pennsylvania Press. Part V. 26: Body Motion. pp. 173-227

• Yu, N. (2002). Body and emotion: Body parts in Chinese expression of emotion. In Nick Enfield and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), special issue “The Body in Description of Emotion: Cross-Linguistic Studies,” Pragmatics and Cognition 10(1/2), 341–367.

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Charles Darwin(1872). The Expression of the Emotions in the Man and Animals

• The power of communication between the members of the same tribe by means of language has been of paramount importance in the development of man; and the force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body… Nevertheless there are no grounds, as far as I can discover, for believing that any muscle has been developed or even modified exclusively for the sake of expression.

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Ray L. Birdwhistell (1918-1994)

• Society as an organized system preceded man by thousands of species, that man did not invent society but, rather, society invented man. (1975:43)

• A knowledge of behavioural biology is necessary for the understanding of the history of society. (1975:43)

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A hundred years before Darwin,

• The physiognomists were preoccupied with the study of gestures and facial expression as both indicative of personality and as of absolute importance to human intercourse.

• The force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and the body.

Birdwhistell (1975: 43)

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• A human being contains within him activities, structures or forces which operate to express attitudes, feelings or passions that are recognizable and reacted to by other members of his species. The behaviour consequent to these basic feelings is separate and different from that which is performed in language usage.

• I cannot understand communication and social interaction if I attempt to sub-divide the behaviour which I observe, record and analyse into two distinct types: one, socially coded, the other, physiologically coded.

Birdwhistell (1975: 51-52)

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A question raised by Birdwhistell

• The question about expression, gesture, position or movement:

– Is there any piece of body behaviour which is such a specific isolate that it overrides all conditions of its appearance?

(1975: 55)

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Physical Action Verbs in Chinese (Gao, 2001)

Hypothesis:

• The event structures of physical action verbs are not arbitrarily constructed but rather the constructions are built through systematic cognitive processes in relation to both human physical reality and concrete reality in the world.

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Physical Action VV Compounds in Chinese (Gao, 2001)

• If we take a close look at the manner distinctions of those physical action verbs that are characteristic of certain body part actions,

• such as, 打 ‘ hit/beat/strike’, 拖 ‘ pull/drag’, 拿 ‘ take’, 踢 ‘ kick’, and 碰 ‘ touch’, we may notice a common phenomenon in their sentence patterning, – that is, their semantic combinability and

syntactical constructions are actually dependent upon the flexibility of the human agent’s body parts that perform the verbal actions.

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拿 as a hand act and 踢 as a foot act

• 拿 is an action performed by hand and 踢 by foot,

• semantically as well as syntactically, 拿 has more collocations and can be more structurally extended than 踢 .

– This is due to the fact that the hand, the agent of the action 拿 , is able to perform more complicated actions than the foot.

– For the same reason verbs expressing hand actions are the majority of the physical action verbs

• e.g. Out of 334 physical action verbs that are defined in this study, 299 are hand action verbs. (See Gao. 234-243).

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Verbs of Hand Action often elicit sequences of actions, while verbs of Foot Action usually

do not. The more flexible a hand action is, the more

actions it can elicit. • e.g., in the Sinica Corpus

– 打 ‘ hit/beat’ is found to have the most instances that involve collocations,

– the verb 拿 ‘ take’ has 385 examples and 232 of them introduce two or three actions caused by 拿 within a single clause structure.

– 踢 ‘ kick’ has 54 examples, 5 of which have one more act caused by 踢 .

– 碰 ‘ touch’ is also a hand act but only 6 out of 58 examples entail one more action caused by 碰 .

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Correlation between the structure usage frequency and the semantic representation

• E.g., • 碰 expresses an instantaneous contact with an

entity, and this one single touch forms a complete event contour that can be made explicit with a basic event structure typical of an action verb.

• In comparison with 碰 , the actions expressed by 打 and 拿 are more flexible and diverse in terms of action manner and duration and thus capable of causing a series of other subsequent actions to happen.

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• All these basic facts seem to show that the semantic representation of a physical action verb plays a large role in setting up a limit to its syntactical extension.

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VV compounds, formed by various physical action verbs

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Features of Physical Action VV Compounds • VV compound word formation is one of the most distinctive features

of Chinese.

• Extensive studies were done in the 1960s by Chao (1968) and Lu (1975).

• Later investigations have been carried out from various perspectives (e.g. Li & Thompson 1989; Nishiyama 1998; Li 1990).

• Semantically Chinese VV compounds have either a resultative or a parallel relation between the two verbal elements.

• Due to their semantic features, verbs of physical action in a strict sense, namely, verbs of direct physical contact, are all found to be able to form resultative constructions.

• This is due to the fact that a verb of physical contact always requires an objective argument in its basic clause structure.

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Features of Physical Action VV Compounds• When a verb of physical action takes the

predicate position of a causative construction, the physical flexibility of the body part that causes the event to happen is determined by the capability of constituting its linguistic relations.

• e.g., all action verbs that can be seen as involving direct physical contact always represent event causation but never factive causation (Huang 1974: 354-369)

• The syntactic properties of these two different types are radically different (Vendler 1967).

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Definition of a causative construction for a physical action verb

• An event caused by the human agent’s certain physical action subsequently causes another event to happen.

or

• An event causes another event that involves certain physical contact of the human agent, which may subsequently cause a third event to happen.

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Properties needed

• i. A verb of physical action expresses an event that is identified as a cause event. In such a case the subject argument is the agent and the object argument is the patient.

• ii. Another event expressed by a linguistic element is clearly seen as the result of the former event.

• iii. The two events mentioned in (i) and in (ii) make up a resultative relation between the two. – e.g., 他打破了花瓶。

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Resultative VV Compounds

• When the first verb in a VV compound is a physical action verb. There are several different kinds of results to be found.

• They can be specified as: – (A) Cause – (B) Achievement – (C) Direction– (D) Phase (cf. Li & Thompson 1989)

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(A) Cause Resultative VV Compound

• In a Cause resultative VV compound V2 expresses a result to the direct object caused by V1. This result usually causes the object to have a change in its quality or state.

• e.g., – 他咬断了铅笔。 – 他把鞋子拖坏了。

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(B) Achievement VV Compound

• On the contrary, V1 in an Achievement VV compound makes its direct object achieve something or reach a certain state but this result does not give the object any change in quality, and thus, V2 is usually an adjectival verb.

• E.g.,– 他擦干桌子了。 – 他把那块地踩平了。

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(C) Direction Resultative VV

• In a Direction resultative VV compound, the role of V2 can be taken by three types of verbs:

• Type 1 - the two directional verbs 來‘ come’ and 去 ‘ go’, one indicating a direction toward the speaker and the other away from the speaker.

• Type 2 - the eight directional verbs 上 ‘ ascend’, 下 ‘ descend’, 进 ‘ enter’, 出 ‘ exit’, 起 ‘ rise’, 回 ‘ return’, 过 ‘ cross’, and 开 ‘ open’. – In addition to their independent verbal meanings, these eight directional

verbs specify a different directional motion respectively when occurring in a resultative VV compound.

• Type 3 – a VV directional verb or compound consisting of a Type 1 directional verb and a Type 2 directional verb. Its formation is always a ‘Type 2 + Type 1’ sequence.

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V1 vs. V2

• It appears that no matter with which type of a direction verb a physical action VV compound is formed, it is V1 that causes the direct object to be displaced or move toward a direction.

• Due to the physical contact effect on the object, V2 may signal a motion from the object itself as in– 他把球踢进了

• or a motion started together with the subject as in– 他把马骑跑了。

• Obviously this is due to the movability of the human subjective agent.

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(D) Phase Resultative VV Compound

• In a Phase resultative VV compound the interpretation of result is unspecified. Instead, V2 expresses either the type of action described by V1 or the degree to which it is carried out.

• E.g., – 他包完了书。 – 他捞着了一条鱼。 – 他拖住了马车。 – 他捉到了一只蓝蝴蝶。 – 他把书架上的书摆好了。

• This type of compound usually describes a continuous, or time-consuming action, and, thus, there are not many physical action verbs that can occur in such a construction. It is not possible, for instance, for any of the verbs of head action to form such a construction.

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Physical Constraints for the VV Compound Formation • It seems that not many physical action verbs can be

combined together to have causative and resultative compound formation nor can many such verbs be freely arranged to form a parallel construction.

• This phenomenon of limited formation may be considered as coming from both syntactic and semantic constraints for a VV compound construction. – Syntactically, the basic rule is: a VV compound must be formed

by a transitive verb, taking the V1 slot, and an intransitive verb, taking the V2 slot.

• However, most of the verbs of physical action are transitive verbs, and thus they cannot freely be formed into such a formation.

– Semantically, for such a formation lexical-semantic constraints must be obeyed by both verbs.

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Characteristics of Physical Action VV Compounds • Both V1 and V2 are agentive, physical action verbs. • It is not always possible for any physical action verb to

combine with another to form a VV compound. Verbs of hand and foot actions are most commonly combined but no instances have been found that have a causative relation between V1 and V2 when V1 and V2 are verbs of the same body part actions, except for verbs of hand and foot actions. – For instance, there are no VV compounds in which V1 is a head

action verb and V2 is another head action verb. – In other words, it is impossible to have a “head action + head

action” word formation.

• The V1 slot can only be taken by transitive body part action verbs, while V2 allows both transitive and intransitive verbs.

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Causer’s Physical Action plus Causee’s Physical Action

• foot act + foot act • hand act + whole body act • hand act + foot act • hand act + mouth act• mouth act + mouth act • mouth act + foot act

• 踢跑 • 打倒 • 推走 • 打哭• 说笑• 叫来

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Bodypart Constraints vs. Causability

• The following examples are all illogical and random combinations that yield ungrammatical results:

– * 绊蹦– * 跑踩 – * 拉捡 – * 碰咬

• Nor is it possible for V1 and V2 to change positions:– * 跑踢 – * 倒打 – * 走推

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Combination of Various Bodypart Actions

• The possibility of having a VV compound in which both V1 and V2 are associated with only the subjective Agent leaving the objective entity as the pure Patient regardless of what relation the two actions could be.

• Then, actions done by both different bodyparts and the same bodypart of the Agent subject are more compatible and harmonious.

• V1 and V2 may be generally seen as having a parallel relation, yet, still holding various secondary relations. – e.g. 吃喝 eat-drink’, 揉拍 ‘ massage-clap’, and 捏 打 ‘ seize-

hit’, are done by the same bodypart.

• Such VV compounding forms are rather loosely related. There are no mutual syntactical nor semantic constraints.

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Combination of Various Bodypart Actions

• It is possible for two hand action verbs to form a VV compound in which V1 action functions as the pre-condition for a V2 action, as in 拼摆‘ put together-place’, 拉拢‘ pull-gather together’, and 抚摸‘ stroke-feel’.

• This group of VV physical action compounds are formed in such a way that V1 and V2 actions should always happen in an established routine order.

• This can be understood as denoting that the V1 action is done for the purpose of laying a pre-condition for the V2 action.

• For this reason, the order is not reversible, and for the same reason, V2 is the core of the predicate.

• Thus, the sentence meaning basically remains unchanged even if V1 is deleted, as can be seen from the following two examples: – 她要拆洗全家人的棉衣。 – 她要洗全家人的棉衣。

• Then, if it is V2 that is deleted, the meaning representation of the predicate will deviate considerably from its original VV compound as shown in – 她要拆全家人的棉衣。

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• There are quite a number of synonyms of physical action verbs that are found possible to find appearing together as VV compounds – e.g 搂抱 ‘ cuddle-embrace’, 蹦跳 ‘ leap-jump’, and 亲吻 ‘ kiss-

kiss’

• It seems that when a VV compound is composed of two synonym action verbs each focusing on a slightly different manner, the whole event contour can be separated into two individual events.

• No matter which of the two is deleted, the single morpheme verb can still function as the predicate without much change of the sentence meaning. – 他把存款单摆 / 放在柜台上。 – 他轻轻碰 / 触了一下灯泡。

Combination of Various Bodypart Actions

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• Some compounds that describe striking actions, hold a semantically hierarchical relation between V1 and V2– 敲打‘ knock-hit’, 捶打‘ pound-hit’, 踢打’ kick-hit’

• V1 is the hyponym of V2.• V1 particularizes the V2 action by, for instance,

specifying the manner, the bodypart that performs the action, and the instrument applied.

Combination of Various Bodypart Actions

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Corpus Data of the Physical Action VV Compounds

Bodypart

Total Number of Examples Causative Construction Percentage

Hand(s) 7005 19% Foot 173 10% Arms 174 9% Mouth 1230 7% Teeth 79 6% Fist 17 6% Fingers 84 5% Shoulder 47 4% Buttocks 99 4% Head 96 1% Lips 90 1% Back 44 0% Knee 39 0%

Percentage rate of the causative VV constructions formed by verbs of physical action in the Sinica Corpus

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Percentage rate of the combinability of two verbs of physical action

forming a VV compound found in the Sinica Corpus Bodypart Number of Examples

Found in the Corpus Number of Different Verbs Applied in a VV Compound

Percentage of the Total Physical Contact Verbs

Hand(s) 1014 71 23% Mouth 59 10 3.2% Foot 59 8 2.6% Whole Body 39 3 1.0% Arms 1 2 0.6% Teeth 0 0 0% Shoulder 0 0 0% Buttocks 0 0 0% Head 0 0 0% Lips 0 0 0% Back 0 0 0% Knee 0 0 0%

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A Linguistic Principle Compatible with Physical Reality

• Compatible with the fact that a sentence is not only an ideal unit of discourse but also an operationally necessary element in continuous behavior (Allott 1991), there are no long sentences found in the corpus with randomly formed collocations, nor any unrestrictedly complex sentences such as can be produced by computer languages (cf. Sigurd & Gao 1999).

• This finding prompts us to make a further assumption: – The linguistic principle for the extension or

complexity of a sentence with a physical action predicate is supposed to originate from human physical reality.