A Study of Motion Events in Chinese Children s Stories for 7 to 11 Years-Olds

This study dimes to investigate how selected Chinese story books present motion events to the readers of 7 to 11 year-olds. 2 Chinese story books written in Taiwan were selected and 814 motion verbs were found. The structures of the motion events in the books are listed in categories. The use of path, manner, and deixis are counted and other elements such as Figure, Ground, and the metaphoric usage are also investigated. The results show that the most frequent structure used in Chinese seems to be Path Only and Manner+1 Path, which is not compatible with the suggestion of Slobin (Slobin, 2004). Also, the results of this study showed a more frequent use of Path, which is different from the suggestion of Ozgahskan and Slobin that Manner verbs are more silent in Chinese as in English (Ozcaliskan and Slobin, 2003). According to this study, the use of Chinese Motion Events is closer to Turkish instead of English. However, while dao4 (arrive) is considered as a Path verb in this study, it seems that Chui considered it as a Dative (Chui, 2012). It may be a cause of the variation.