Event conflation in high stakes testing: a comparison of usage and relationship to writing scores by language types

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Abstract Talmy (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical form. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3, 36–149. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. In Proceedings of the 17th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 480–519. Berkeley Linguistics Society) introduced the concept of event conflation: that two micro events can be conceptualized and expressed as a single macro event. He proposed a linguistic typology based on ths concept, and second language acquisition studies have suggested that learners whose first language is of a different type than their target language have extra difficulty interpreting and reproducing event conflation in the target language phrases. However, the degree to which using conflation patterns similar to the first language in one’s target language impedes communication is still unclear. To observe the effect of first and second language type mismatches on communicative ability, data was taken from the independent writing task of the TOEFL iBT® Public Use Dataset and the Event Conflation Finder was used to extract and analyze instances of path encoding. Framing tendencies and correlations between these tendencies and rater scores were compared amongst learners whose first languages are often argued to be one of the three major types: satellite-framed, mixed-framed, and verb-framed. I found that only learners with verb-framed first languages exhibited a clear pattern of correlation between typical satellite-framing patterns and rater scores, suggesting that satellite-framed expressions are more difficult for learners whose first language is verb-framed.