Iconicity in event conceptualization

This paper focuses on the iconic relationship between syntactic compactness (monoclausality) and event continuity in conceptualization. With the Chinese Serial Verb Construction reporting action-motion events, such as 买书回家 mǎi shū huí jiā (‘buy a book/books and return home’), as a test case, results from experiments on Chinese native speakers demonstrate that monoclausal forms are significantly less preferred when the resultant state of the preceding action is nullified, whereas their biclausal counterparts remain relatively stable under such disruptions. Drawing on experimental evidence, I argue that monoclausal sentences reflect stricter cognitive requirements for event continuity than their biclausal counterparts. This finding supports the iconic relationship between language and conceptualization ( Haiman, 1983 , 1985 ) and aligns with the isomorphic relationship between the two ( Croft, 2003 , p. 102; Givón, 1985 ). However, the unexpected lack of difference under spatio-temporal disruptions suggests that this cognitive constraint is not uniform but conditional upon the specific dimension of continuity, when verbalized.