Abstract
The study explores how Arabic has the same conflation pattern characteristics as English even though it belongs to Verb-framed Languages. A focused-group approach is used to evaluate the effect of the first language (L1) and the potential role of proficiency in the acquisition of the English directional preposition ‘to’ with manner-of-motion to goal construction. One group consists of Saudi speakers at two levels of development; an intermediate and advanced proficiency levels; whereas, the second group (control group) comprises of English native speakers. Acceptability Judgment Task associated with video animation clips is designed to elicit participants’ judgments in the depicted event. Results indicated that the intermediate Saudi speakers accept the directional preposition ‘to’ with and without boundary-crossing event, as is the case of their L1, which was opposite for the advanced and native English speakers for the without boundary-crossing event. The advanced Saudi speakers accept the constructions of encoding the manner with the motion and expressing the manner as the complement depicting an appropriate description of the event, reflecting L1 influence. All the group’s judgment varies based on the acceptance to conflate the manner with the motion overexpressing manner as a complement in an event without boundary-crossing.
Highlights
The motion concept is universally acknowledged across all languages around the world based on its pervasiveness in the daily lives (Blackledge & Creese, 2017). Pavlenko and Volynsky (2015) state that the motion expression differs among languages
It showed that Saudi participants at the two levels of proficiency accepted the co-occurrence of the directional preposition ‘to’ in the motion event with the boundary-crossing (Advanced Saudi speakers = 50 % – Intermediate Saudi speakers = 63 %)
Both Saudi groups accepted to conflate manner with motion with ‘to’ in the event with and without boundary-crossing. Since this conflation pattern is the characteristic of the English language, native speakers supply high judgments in the event without boundary-crossing
Summary
The motion concept is universally acknowledged across all languages around the world based on its pervasiveness in the daily lives (Blackledge & Creese, 2017). Pavlenko and Volynsky (2015) state that the motion expression differs among languages. Pavlenko and Volynsky (2015) state that the motion expression differs among languages. In the Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the acquisition of argument structures has been widely recognized, in the area of the acquisition of manner-of-motion to goal constructions (Rothman & Slabakova, 2018). Talmy (1985) has intrigued the interest of researchers who investigated the realization of English manner-of-motion to goal constructions by different first language learners (L1s) (Cadierno & Ruis, 2006; Brown & Gullberg, 2010; Chen, 2005; Choi & Lantolf, 2008; Donoso & Bylund, 2015; Römer, O’Donnell, & Ellis, 2014; Vergaro & Iacobini, 2014). His work classifies the languages into Verb-framed languages, such as Spanish, Turkish and Semitic languages, which include Arabic and Hebrew and Satellite-framed languages, i.e., English and German (Note 1) topic
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