Finding One's Path Into Another Language: On the Expression of Boundary Crossing by English Learners of French

Abstract

Languages vary considerably in how they represent motion. One major source of variation (Talmy, 2000) depends on whether linguistic systems lexicalize path in the verb (verb‐framed languages) or in satellites (satellite‐framed languages). This typological difference involves more than different verb types in that it also affects elements outside the verb. The current study is concerned with the implications of such typological properties for second language learning, specifically studying speakers of a satellite‐framed language (English) acquiring a verb‐framed language (French). We hypothesize that typological differences between source and target languages should present some difficulties to learners. For English learners of French, an additional difficulty should result from the fact that French is not entirely consistent in its patterning, allowing English‐like lexicalization patterns in some cases, but not in others. This requires the learners to discover the nature of the regularities from a target input that presents them with constrained variability.

Encoding Path in Motion Events: Boundary-Crossing as a Relevant Typological Criterion

“…This fact supports the hypotheses of other researchers (Slobin, 2004;Folli and Ramchand, 2005;Pavlenko and Volynsky, 2015;Hendriks and Hickmann, 2015) who have stated that there is no typological purism and that Talmy's dichotomy should be extended. A deeper investigation into the boundary-crossing could also impact current and future translators, who will understand this phenomenon better and will learn how to build their linguistic capacities in capturing various dimensions of…”

Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of boundary crossing events in L2 acquisition

“…In SLA, as Cadierno (2010) shows, L1 Spanish speakers use the construction non manner verb + path in satellite to a larger extent and English learners of French tend to rely on satellite-framing to express boundary crossing, according to Hendriks and Hickmann (2015).…”

“…With regard to empirical research on the boundary-crossing constraint in SLA, two studies stand out: Cadierno's (2010) and Hendriks and Hickmann's (2015). In the former it was found that the Spanish group used the construction non-manner verb + path in satellite to a larger extent than the German and Russian groups, which showed the typical lexicalisation pattern of S-languages and the Spanish group showed a more varied pattern of distribution.…”

“…Research has mainly focused on answering the question of whether L2 learners can actually acquire the L2 thinking for speaking patterns and many studies have dealt with cross-linguistic research in motion events, such as Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Burnand, and Bylund (2015), Brown and Gullberg (2010, Bylund (2009), Bylund and Athanasopoulous (2015), Bylund andJarvis (2011), Cadierno (2004), Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), Daller, TreffersDaller, and Furman (2010), Filipović (2011), Flecken, Carroll, Weimar, andvon Stutterheim (2015), Hendriks and Hickmann (2015), Hijazo-Gascón (2011), Pavlenko and Volynsky (2015), Stam (2010Stam ( , 2015, Tomczak and Ewert (2015), Vulchanova, Martínez, Eshuis, and Listhaug (2012), and Wu (2011).…”

“…We focus on the boundary-crossing constraint as (a) Talmy's two-way typology shows tendencies in languages to lexicalise path in the verb (V-languages) or in a satellite (S-languages). This typology is especially relevant in the crossing of spatial boundaries because in the description of motion events involving the crossing of a boundary, V-languages use path verbs to indicate the change of location, as in exit or enter and (b) most research on motion events has not focused on boundary-crossing, with the exception of a few studies such as Naigles, Eisenberg, Kako, Highter, andMcGraw (1998), Gennari, Sloman, Malt, andFitch (2002), and Özçaliskan (2003, 2015) in first language acquisition and Cadierno (2010) and Hendriks and Hickmann (2015) in SLA.…”