Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1998, 2010) propose manner/result complementarity hypothesis (MRC), i.e. verbs can not lexicalize manner and result simultaneously at a time. As to the encoding of motion events, Levin et al. (2009) also claim that manner of motion verbs across languages simply lexicalize manner and no direction is entailed. However, three basic motion verbs in Chinese—zou 'walk', pao 'run' and fei'fly', which are regarded as prototypical manner of motion verbs but also seem to lexicalize directed motion when used in some constructions. Then the questions are: do these verbs lexicalize direction of motion and are they counterexamples of the MRC? The answers to the questions are important as they can provide cross-linguistic evidence for or against the MRC hypothesis and reveal the possible lexicalization patterns of motion verbs in Chinese. Based on evidence gained from a series of linguistic tests, this study argues that on the one hand different from views of Levin et al. (2009), the three manner of motion verbs can indeed lexicalize directed motion, but on the other hand they never encode the manner and direction of motion simultaneously and thus they are not counterexamples of the MRC.
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