L2 acquisition of caused motion expressions; linguistic relativity; motion event typology; similarity judgment task
摘要:
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This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two
lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively,
syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner,
path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video
clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how
monolingual native speakers of Chinese and English judge the similarity
between caused motion scenes while viewing them. Our results regarding a)
show that Chinese learners of English acclimate to the target pattern of
organizing particularly dense caused motion information very rapidly, and
English learners of Chinese also arrived at an inter–language showing
considerable resemblance to the target system rather than traces of the L1
influence. Our findings regarding b) reveal that despite striking differences
between Chinese and English in L1 motion descriptions, native speakers show
an identical tendency to prefer the path–match alternate over the manner–
match alternate. Overall, these observations suggest that language–specific
constraints can be largely shaken off when encoding caused motion in a non–
native language, and linguistic and non-linguistic representations of caused
motion may be dissociable from each other.