Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This article addresses the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology. It proposes adiachronic aspect of macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-eventintegrates two simple events through grammaticalization. This hypothesis is supported by the behaviors of directional verbsin Mandarin Chinese in that these forms alone can express almost all five types of macro-events that Talmy analyzed, and thatthese macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simple events, and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization.This study relates two seemingly unrelated areas of research, i.e. event structure and grammaticalization and provides a newperspective to the Talmyan typological paradigm.