Unveiling Realization Events: An Event Integration Analysis of “V + Dào” Constructions in Mandarin

This study explores the event integration patterns within Mandarin's "V + Dào" constructions, specifically focusing on realization events. The analysis reveals that internal event integration within the verb (IEI_V) can conflate two or three conceptual primitives, demonstrating flexibility in encoding event semantics. Similarly, internal event integration within "Dào" (IEI_D) consistently involves two conceptual primitives. At the constructional level, external event integration (EEI_VD) is composed of 11 distinct combinations of IEI_V and IEI_D, formulated as “2+2” or “3+2,” reflecting various ways in which conceptual primitives are integrated. By the method of correlation analysis and the framework of event integration, these constructions align with the verb-resultative structure (VRes), central to the realization event framework. Hierarchical analysis of the variables in both IEI_V and IEI_D indicates the prioritization of factors such as association function (AssoFun), action properties (ActiPro), and syntactic types. Additionally, the "V + Dào" construction (Chin_VD) shows weak correlations with several variables, suggesting its relative independence in the event structure. These findings point to a high degree of grammaticalization of the "V + Dào" construction in realization events, offering valuable insights into the structure of Mandarin's motion-event constructions. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the syntactic and semantic interaction in Mandarin event structures and provides important implications for further research on similar Chinese resultative constructions.