The School of English and the Department of English Language Acquisition
invite everybody interested to a guest lecture by
Norwegian University of Science & Technology.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, 5 May 2011, at 6:30 p.m. in room C1.
Thinking for speaking and path encoding in first and second languages
Abstract
Despite the commonality in underlying conceptual structure, languages display a great variation in the encoding of spatial features and relations (cf. e.g., Levinson & Wilkins 2006, Bowerman & Choi 2001, Coventry and Garrod 2004, Malt et al. 2008, Dimitrova-Vulchanova et al., in press). Talmy’s (1985, 2000) influential model suggests a typology for capturing the cross-linguistic variation in the domain of motion encoding, depending on how languages express overtly the semantic element path of motion. This model has encouraged research charting both well studied and lesser-studied languages. Now, while for first languages there is a growing body of evidence and theories of spatial terms and their acquisition, both research in, and hypotheses, regarding these aspects of second languages are still scarce (cf. the exhaustive survey in Cadierno 2008). In addition, while in first language acquisition the mapping of spatial categories onto language does not pose a problem, L2 learners face a vast array of challenges in acquiring the appropriate meaning and use of spatial terms, prepositions being a notorious example, reflected both in comprehension and production tasks (cf. Lakkis & Malak 2000). The evidence of whether and to what extent L2 speakers acquire the target L2 thinking for speaking patterns (cf. Slobin 2001, 2004) is inconclusive. While Cadierno & Ruiz (2006) show little or no evidence of L1 transfer in the L2 way of describing motion events, in a similar study, Stam (2006) demonstrates the presence of L1 thinking for speaking patterns, combined with grammatical L2 production. Clearly the emergence of target language thinking for speaking correlates strongly with the degree of L2 attainment, and in the light of recent inquiry into the upper limitations of the latter (cf. e.g. Birdsong 2007), an interesting question is whether target language spatial thinking is ever possible.
In this talk I report on-going research designed to test empirically Talmy’s verb-framed vs. satellite-framed typology on two languages, Norwegian and Bulgarian, which, in theory, should belong in the same group. Yet, a detailed description of the linguistic inventory of the two languages yields not only finer nuances, but systematic differences in the strategies these languages employ for motion description. As revealed by such a comparison, the two languages differ in that, while Norwegian displays a distinction among towards, to, away from, from and via paths in the lexicon primarily in the range of prepositions and free standing particles available, Bulgarian makes this distinction in its verbal lexicon. Furthermore, as emphasized in usage-based theories (e.g., Tomasello 2003, Slobin 2006), the strategies and expressions, which are both frequently and preferentially used by native speakers are even more revealing than the linguistic system as such. With this in mind, we ran an experiment that allows for direct comparison of what native speakers of the two languages resort to when describing directed motion events. More importantly, our experiment allows for testing empirically the hypothesized differences between the two languages. Our experimental results support the hypothesized differences between Norwegian and Bulgarian and suggest a finer-grained typology in the domain of spatial categories and their linguistic encoding. We propose that one way of capturing cross-linguistic distinctions is in terms of Slobin’s notion of thinking for speaking patterns or strategies, combined with a feature-based analysis and a distinction in the lexicon in terms of basic-level vs. specific verbs of motion (Dimitrova-Vulchanova et al., in press).
Our second objective was to provide experimental evidence of the extent to which one’s first language interacts with, and influences the description of motion events in a second language. The L2 data did not show any specific L1 transfer in patterns of thinking for speaking. Thus Bulgarian speakers of Norwegian as L2 used prepositions very much like the Norwegian L1 speakers and at the same rate across all conditions. One way of interpreting these findings is in terms of the so-called avoidance strategy which is well-attested in the L2 literature or, alternatively, as reflecting stages in the acquisition of spatial terms with prepositions coming first (as in e.g., L1 acquisition), and the (rich) verb lexicon coming later. However, the pattern of preposition usage was replicated also in the data from verb usage for the same two groups, suggesting that the Bulgarian L2 speakers of Norwegian are well under way in having acquired the Norwegian L1 patterns of thinking for speaking. We suggest a viable explanation of these results in terms of shared conceptual representations (cf. Clark 2001, among others).
References:
Bowerman & Choi (2001) Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language-specific in the learning of spatial semantic categories. In Bowerman, M. & S. Levinson, eds., Language acquisition and conceptual development. CambridgeUniversity Press.
Cadierno, T. (2008). Learning to talk about motion in a foreign language. In: Robinson, P., & Ellis, N. C. (eds.). Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. Routledge: Taylor & Francis.
Cadierno, T. & L. Ruiz (2006) Motion events in Spanish L2 acquisition. In: Annual review of Cognitive Linguistics, Volume 4, Number 1, pp. 183-216.
Clark, E. 2001. Emergent categories in first language acquisition. In: Bowerman, M. & S. Levinson (eds.) Language acquisition and Conceptual development, Cambridge: CUP.
Coventry, K. and S. Garrod (2004) Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial Prepositions. New York: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Dimitrova-Vulchanova, M., L. Martinez & O. Edsberg (in press). A basic level for the encoding of biological motion. In: Hudson, J., MagnussonU. & C. Paradis (eds.). Conceptual Spaces and the Construal of Spatial Meaning. Empirical evidence from human communication. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
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Slobin, D. 2004. The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In: Stromqvist, S. & L. Verhoeven (eds.), pp. 219-257.
Stam, G. (2006) Thinking for speaking about motion: L1 and L2 speech and gesture. IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, Volume: 44, Issue: 2, pp. 145-171.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard: HarvardUniversity Press.
