Abstract

Talking about motion events in L2 is done in different ways by different speakers on different occasions. This is due to multiple factors, typological, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic, which interact and play a role in L2 acquisition and use. These factors can sometimes lead the same types of L2 speakers to produce very different outputs and sometimes very different L2 speakers to produce the same or similar outputs. In order to capture this diversity of outcomes the CASP (Complex Adaptive System Principles) for Bilingualism model was proposed and we illustrate how this model helps us formulate predictions about motion event verbalizations, set up experiments and account for results in a holistic manner, taking into consideration the relevant multiple factors. Furthermore, a lot of effort in the field has gone into contrasting monolingual and bilingual populations while more knowledge is needed about how different bilingual populations compare. These different bilinguals, including L2 learners, need to be tested under different conditions in which they use their languages (e.g., when only one or both is actively used with vs. without the possibility to code-switch) in order to understand the variability of L2 verbal behaviours and the underlying factors at play under different circumstances of acquisition and use. This perspective paper provides both theoretical and empirical indications how this can be done, with the key message that future research into L2 acquisition (and bilingualism in general) must be based on a multi-factor approach.

Highlights

  • Motion events are expressed differently in different languages due to different systemic restrictions or usage preferences

  • Information about the Manner component is often absent in verbalizations of motion events in Spanish and omitted in translations from other manner-rich languages like English (Slobin, 1996; Slobin, 2003; Slobin, 2006). When it comes to expressing caused motion events, Spanish has a clear distinction between intentional and non-intentional causation, which is drawn using different verbs and/or constructions for the two event types respectively [X lanzó Y (‘X threw Y’) vs. se le cayó Y a X (‘to Y it happened that X fell’)]

  • We can put all these task-related differences aside for a moment, for the sake of uniformity of the comparison at hand, and just look at the differences in the reported verbalization of motion events in two different experiments as a way of illustrating the differences in L2 outputs and of explaining how we can account for them using the CASP for Bilingualism model

Read more

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Motion events are expressed differently in different languages due to different systemic restrictions or usage preferences. In some languages the use of manner verbs is restricted due to underlying semantic or morphosyntactic rules (as in Romance or Slavic families) while some other languages have no such restrictions but still exhibit some strong usage preferences (e.g., a preference for manner verbs over path verbs in motion expressions, as in the Germanic languages; see Filipović and Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2015, for a recent overview). These differences formed the basis for a semantic typology of languages

CASP FOR BILINGUALISM MODEL
L2 ACQUISITION AND USE OF MOTION VERBS AND CONSTRUCTIONS
Interlocutor type
CONCLUSION
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call