Bridging East and West Median expressions: A comparative study of Chinese and Polish

While genealogically unrelated, Standard Chinese (Sinitic) and Polish (Slavic) exhibit notable typological similarities in the expression of motion events. Both languages employ satellite-framed constructions (Talmy 1991, 2000) and feature a system of verb satellites – postverbal directionals in Chinese and verb prefixes in Polish – that indicate various segments of the Path, and that are source-oriented (e.g. out), goal-oriented (e.g. into), and median-oriented (e.g. across). 

This paper focuses on the spatial use of satellites encoding median Path, specifically -guo in Chinese and prze- in Polish, as illustrated in examples (1) and (2). Both examples express a translational motion of a figure (moving entity) relative to a ground (reference entity), and imply crossing its boundaries. In the Chinese example (1) -guo appears with the manner verb kāi ‘drive, move.vehicle’, the preposition cóng ‘from, through’, and a relational noun =xià ‘under’, while in the Polish example (2), prze- occurs with the manner verb biec ‘run’ and the preposition przez ‘across, through’ that governs the accusative case.

In order to uncover the range of functions median satellites serve and the types of spatial relations they encode, we analyze spontaneous motion event constructions with median satellites, drawing from contemporary literary corpora in Standard Chinese (Center for Chinese Linguistics Corpus, Peking University; Beijing Languages and Cultures University Chinese Corpus) and Polish (National Corpus of Polish), respectively. We show that while median satellites often indicate motion across an entity, from one side to another, as in (ZH 1) and (POL 2), they are sensitive to contexts in which they occur and can convey a variety of spatial relations in combination with other linguistic devices, such as different prepositions and, in Chinese, different relational nouns. For example, median satellites can occur in the expression of relations such as over (ZH 3, POL 4), under (ZH 1, POL 7), in front of (POL 5), between (ZH 6), among others. 

In this paper, we examine several parameters that, together with the median satellite, nuance, specify, or even modify the median meaning: (i) the presence or absence of the Ground NP, (ii) the types of spatial relations expressed in cooccurring adnominal devices (dynamic vs. locative prepositions, and, in Chinese, relational nouns) and adverbal devices (deictic directionals in Chinese), if any, (iii) the types of figures involved in motion (animate, inanimate), (iv) the types of grounds relative to which motion occurs (e.g. people, places, objects, paths), and (v) the types of manner of motion conveyed by verbs (e.g. ‘run across’, ‘squeeze through’). By investigating the interaction between these parameters, we provide a systematic analysis of the use of the median satellites in these two languages, and contribute to our understanding of this understudied issue.