This study investigates how Mandarin speakers segment causal-chain motion events in a verbalization task. The results demonstrate that Mandarin shows attentional bias for the causal source and goal in causal-chain segmentation, which may be universal across languages. Furthermore, there is a correlation between directness of causation and the complexity of linguistic representations, with direct conceptualization leading to a preference for simpler constructions (e.g. causative verb construction, resultative verb construction), and indirect causation for more complex representations (e.g. causative periphrases and multi-macro-event constructions). The most salient factor for directness of causation in causal-chain segmentation is spatio-temporal contiguity. The macro-event property (MEP) is used to test the tightness of Mandarin causative constructions from a typological perspective. It is concluded that Mandarin demonstrates greater similarity with Ewe and Lao, but differs from Japanese and Yukatek regarding grammatical integration and event integration in causal-chain segmentation.

中文翻译：

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事件分割和因果关系：普通话因果链运动案例*

本研究调查了普通话使用者如何在言语任务中分割因果链运动事件。结果表明，普通话在因果链分割中对因果源和目标表现出注意偏差，这可能是跨语言普遍存在的。此外，因果关系的直接性与语言表征的复杂性之间存在相关性，直接概念化导致对更简单结构的偏好（例如使动动词结构、结果动词结构），而间接因果关系则导致更复杂的表征（例如使役旁白和多宏观事件结构）。因果链分割中因果关系直接性的最显着因素是时空连续性。宏观事件属性（MEP）用于从类型学角度检验普通话使役结构的紧密性。结论是，普通话与埃维语和老挝语表现出更大的相似性，但在因果链分割的语法整合和事件整合方面与日语和尤卡泰语有所不同。