Frog, where are you? On the acquisition of ‘Motion events’ by second language learners of Portuguese

Talmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed (V) languages, that express Path of motion in the main verb and express Manner only when explicitly foregrounded for some reason. Given this background, how do late second learners of Portuguese, whose L1 (Dutch) is characterized as an S-language, lexicalize spontaneous dynamic Motion events in their L2, which is characterized as a V-language? In this study we investigate Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking (TFS) hypothesis (1996a), which states that the language we speak influences the way we are thinking during the mental processes of preparing content for speech and that restructuring these TFS patterns during second language acquisition may be difficult. As the L2 learners are acquiring a language that differs typologically from their L1, we investigate if they restructured their TFS...Show moreTalmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed (V) languages, that express Path of motion in the main verb and express Manner only when explicitly foregrounded for some reason. Given this background, how do late second learners of Portuguese, whose L1 (Dutch) is characterized as an S-language, lexicalize spontaneous dynamic Motion events in their L2, which is characterized as a V-language? In this study we investigate Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking (TFS) hypothesis (1996a), which states that the language we speak influences the way we are thinking during the mental processes of preparing content for speech and that restructuring these TFS patterns during second language acquisition may be difficult. As the L2 learners are acquiring a language that differs typologically from their L1, we investigate if they restructured their TFS patterns to those of the L2, or still use the TFS patterns of their L1. To do this, we look into the lexicalization patterns of Portuguese L2 (Dutch L1) learners and compare them to both Portuguese native speakers’ and Dutch native speakers’ performance. This study makes use of data gathered by the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC) [http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/llc], a collection of spoken and written data of Dutch learners of Romance languages. In total 42 participants were selected for this study: 11 native speakers of Dutch; 11 native speakers of Portuguese; and 20 second language learners of Portuguese. Participants’ linguistic patterns in encoding Motion events were examined by presenting them a selection of fifteen images taken from the picture book Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969), which is regularly used in data elicitation for Motion event research. The participants were told to produce a narrative, describing as complete as possible what is happening with the boy, the dog and the frog in the pictures. The oral data was transcribed using the software Praat. The speech was divided into clauses. All the clauses that contained a spontaneous 6 dynamic Motion event, if the figure moves self-contained from one location to another (e.g. ‘The boy falls into the water’), were extracted. All verbs and modifiers were classified into the following motion categories: Manner verb (manner of motion); Path verb (direction or trajectory of motion); Manner+Path verb, (intermediate position between ‘pure’ Manner verbs and ‘pure’ Path verbs and has both a manner and a path component); Neutral verb (verb that expresses motion, but does not provide information about the manner or trajectory of motion). Native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese performed as I expected, with the Dutch speakers using more Manner verbs and the Portuguese showing a preference for Path verbs. L2 learners’ patterns of motion event lexicalization do not resemble those of either Dutch or Portuguese native speakers. This in-between pattern found in L2 learner’s production suggests two possible explanations: the first explanation builds on the theory of ‘Interlanguage’ as first proposed by Selinker in 1972 (Slabakova, 2016), which claims that the L2 system should be considered a system in its own right and not a defective copy of the target language. The second explanation builds on practical constraints of. This explanation builds on the fact that L2 learners did not possess the same amount of grammatical and lexical knowledge as the native speakers, and therefore they did not perform as native speakers of the target language.Show less

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Frog, where are you? On the acquisition of ‘Motion events’ by second language learners of Portuguese