Uyghur–Chinese Adult Bilinguals’ Construal of Voluntary Motion Events

Abstract

The study examined the implications of Talmy motion event typology and Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the context of Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingualism. Uyghur and Chinese represent genetically distant languages (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) that nonetheless share important framing properties in the motion domain, i.e., verb-framing. This study thus aimed to establish how this structural overlap would inform bilingual speakers’ construal of motion events. Additionally, it sought to offer an “end state” perspective to a previous study on Uyghur–Chinese child bilinguals and to shed light on issues around the longevity of crosslinguistic influence. Thirty adult Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilinguals were invited to describe a set of voluntary motion events (e.g., “a man runs across the road”). Their verbalizations, alongside those from 24 monolingual Uyghur and 12 monolingual Chinese speakers were systematically analyzed with regard to the kind of linguistic devices used to encode key components of motion (main verb vs. other devices), the frequency with which the components are expressed together (Manner + Path) or separately (Path or Manner) and how they are syntactically packaged. The findings show that the bilinguals’ thinking-for-speaking patterns are largely language-specific, with little crosslinguistic influence. A comparison of our findings with previous studies on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals revealed no developmental change either in the analyzed aspects of motion descriptions or in patterns of crosslinguistic influence. As such, the findings lend support to accounts that propose crosslinguistic influence to be a developmental phenomenon.

Uyghur–Chinese early successive adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion events

“…The unique language combination enabled us to demonstrate that CLI can happen in languages that are genetically distant (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) and typologically distinct (agglutinative vs. analytical), and that when there is a clear structural overlap between languages, CLI can be largely quantitative (i.e., more frequent use of a particular structure), not qualitative (i.e., use of suboptimal or target-deviant structures). A comparison with Tusun's (2019) study on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals' expression of CM noted an increase of this CLI from child to adult bilinguals, which we interpreted as supporting the coactivation account. However, further comparisons of our findings with those of an earlier study on Uyghur-Chinese adult bilinguals' VM expression (Tusun, 2022a) revealed that, while structural overlap is a key motivating factor for CLI, neither of the two hypotheses can comprehensively explain patterns of CLI we see across event types (CM vs. VM) and age groups in Uyghur-Chinese bilingualism.…”

“…Additionally, we mentioned that this study hopes to offer more general remarks on the nature of CLI by comparing its findings with those of an earlier study (Tusun, 2022a) where the same adult bilinguals followed the same experimental procedure as this study but verbalized a set of VM events. Specifically, Tusun found that the bilinguals followed the monolingual Chinese pattern of predominantly using the equipollently-framed strategy, and thus showed no CLI.…”

“…We mentioned that this study offers an 'end-state' perspective to Tusun (2019) who examined Uyghur-Chinese early successive child bilinguals' expression of CM and therefore can shed light on the question of the longevity of CLI in the context of early successive bilingualism (cf. Hulk, 2017;van Dijk et al, 2022).…”

“…We should highlight that even discussions around the longevity of CLI in motion expression can benefit by taking account of general principles of bilingual language processing and use. Recall that in Tusun (2019), the child bilinguals consistently bypassed the shared verb-framing option in their L2 Chinese and used the Chinesespecific equipollently-framed pattern as the predominant strategy until age 10 when they started using the verb-framed strategy at adult frequency. That is, there was no L1-L2 CLI that was observed in the case of adult bilinguals.…”

“…By establishing whether and to what extent Tusun's findings hold for adult bilinguals' construal of CM, our findings will illuminate the dynamics of CLI more generally. Thirdly, by looking at adult bilinguals, the study offers an 'end-state' perspective to a previous study on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals' expression of CM (Tusun, 2019), and thus, its findings promise to shed light, albeit indirectly, on the issue of the longevity of CLI in the context of early successive bilingualism (cf. Hulk, 2017;van Dijk et al, 2022).…”