Our center director Prof. Ji Yinglin has recently published her new book “The Expression of Motion events” (ISBN978-7-5161-5196-9) with China Social Sciences Press.  

The book has a total of 73,000 words. It addresses the issue of how children and adults express spontaneous and caused motion events through large-scale empirical studies from the perspectives of language typology and first language acquisition. It aims to answer two questions: 1) what are the differences and similarities between English and Chinese in terms of the typology of spatial language; 2) which factor is more important in the acquisition of one’s mother tongue, general cognitive properties or language specificity? The research shows that English is a typical satellite-framed language, while Chinese has both properties of verb-framed language and that of satellite-framed language in expressing motion event, and its typological status alters with the nature of the motion event. Moreover, the typological differences between English and Chinese in encoding space constrain the type and number of semantic components that children typically express at the clause level. Chinese-speaking children produce utterances expressing motion events with a significantly higher semantic density than their English-speaking counterparts. The pattern can be explained by verb compounding in Chinese which gives rise to the simultaneous encoding of multiple semantic elements within a single clause.  

The findings reveal the importance of language-specific factors in first language acquisition. It also lends partial support to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis extensively discussed in the field of cognitive linguistics, demonstrating when and how language may influence human’s cognitive processes.