Chinese as satellite-framed

This article defends the position taken by Talmy that Mandarin Chinese is satellite-framed, and thus argues against Slobin and Chen and Guo that Mandarin is ‘equipollently-framed’. The approach we take is constructional and cognitive in that we draw insights from Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, though it is not restricted to either of them. A more unconventional view of the clause structure in Chinese is first presented, examining the so-called ‘complex sentences’ from a cognitive perspective. The consequence of this view is that the notion of ‘equipollent-framed language’ for Chinese can be abandoned and thus tidying up Talmy’s original typology. It is further argued that the constructional-cognitive view of Chinese captures the structural intuitions more appropriately than a traditional generative account, and that the motion-directional structure in Chinese has been constructionalized to the extent that individual verbs in the construction merge but produce a structure with more than their total properties.