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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.
