The Diachronic Evolution of Polysemous Motion Verbs in Chinese—A Case Study of Zǒu ‘Walk’

Based on the actual uses of the polysemous motion verb zǒu ‘walk’ in the corpora of Chinese texts from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese period, this paper argues that the directed motion sense of the manner verb mainly derives from pragmatic inference from the contexts and cognitive preference for the conceptualization of motion events. In addition, it is essential that favorable morphosyntactic constructions in the language promote the pragmatic sense to be lexicalized as the verb’s lexical meaning. That is, the specific direction encoded in the verb and its grammatical behaviors are not fully determined by the lexical semantics of the verb itself as the grammatical constructions available in the language also account for the evolution of its lexical semantics and grammatical behaviors.