Extending the Talmyan typology: A case study of the macro-event as event integration and grammaticalization in Mandarin

The two-way typology proposed by Leonard Talmy has been extremely influential in the past few decades, and has led to a large number of publications. But while the majority of the literature is devoted to the identification of the verb-framed or satellite-framed status of individual languages, relatively little (if any) research focuses on the foundation of this theory. This article addresses the nature of the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology, proposing a diachronic aspect of the macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-event results from the integration of two simpler events through grammaticalization in Mandarin. This hypothesis is supported by the behavior of directional complements in Mandarin Chinese in that these directional complements in combination with the main verbs can express all the five types of the macro-events that Talmy has analyzed to establish his typology, and that these macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simpler events and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization. This study brings together two seemingly unrelated areas of research, that is, the area of event structure and that of grammaticalization, thus providing a new perspective on the Talmyan typological paradigm. The result, though supported by the data in Mandarin Chinese, might have universal value and implications for other languages as well.