This study investigates sematic categorization of the meaning of placement verbs by Danish and Spanish native speakers and two groups of intermediate second language (L2) learners (Danish learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish learners of L2 Danish). Participants described 31 video clips picturing different types of placement events. Cluster analyses revealed considerable differences in the semantic categorization of these events in Danish and Spanish as well as learning difficulties for the two learner groups. When Danish and Spanish differ in the number and nature of semantic distinctions, L2 verb meaning reconstruction becomes challenging when moving from a more to a less complex system and vice versa. Both learner groups used noncaused motion verbs, overgeneralized given placement verbs, and tended to use L2 verbs haphazardly.

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This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the expression of motion events in these languages showed that Romance languages do not always follow the same pattern; for example, Italian tends to express the component of Path more frequently than French and Spanish. The results of the present study highlight evidence of intra-typological differences, even between languages that are genetically very close. These differences seem to lead speakers to produce cases of conceptual transfer into their second language, Spanish, even when their first language is another Romance language

The main aim of this paper is to raise awareness about the importance of language contrasts in legal interpreting contexts. The semantic typology of motion events put forward by Talmy (1991, 2000) and its implications for discourse and narrative (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004, 2005) are used as an example of how an applied typology approach can be useful for the analysis of language contrasts in a forensic linguistics context. Applied Language Typology (Filipović 2008, 2017a, b) is used here to analyse transcriptions of police interviews that were mediated by an English-Spanish interpreter in California (USA) and an English-Portuguese interpreter in Norfolk (UK). The results of this analysis demonstrate that certain differences in semantic components of motion such as Manner, Cause and Deixis can lead interpreters to add, omit or modify the content of a message in the process of translation. This leads us to conclude that professional practices such as the production of bilingual transcripts and use of control interpreters, together with the inclusion of Applied Language Typology in interpreting training, would improve the quality of interpreting practices in legal contexts.