Evolutionary order of macro-events in Mandarin

This article aims to explore the evolutionary order of the five types of macro-event in Mandarin. As a methodology, a closed corpus is set up for five historical stages. The following is concluded: (1) The “V+C” constructions representing a macro-event started to appear from Stage III and continued to be used until the present stage; (2) The “V+C” constructions can only represent four out of five types of Talmy's macro-event, and action correlating is not systematically represented; (3) The four types of macro-event appeared at a relatively similar time period, and their proportion is: Motion > State change > Temporal > Realization; (4) Verbs with PATH meaning in the V2 slot are more prone to grammaticalization than in the V1 in the serial verb construction “V1+V2”. This research is significant in bridging the areas of event structure, grammaticalization and typology, and might have implications for other languages as well.