SLA&Bilingualism RG, 17 April, 13:15, 603A: a talk on 'Manner and path in L2 users' descriptions of motion trajectories' by Weronika Krzebietke

Speakers of satellite-framed languages tend to describe motion events differently than speakers of verb-framed languages (Talmy 1985). Satellite-framed languages prefer manner-oriented, dynamic descriptions, while the verb-framed ones focus on the path of motion, resulting in more static motion descriptions. Although Polish and English are both satellite-framed languages, recent research suggests that speakers of those languages differ in the perception of motion events and the usage of manner and path verbs while describing them (Ostrowska and Ewert 2012). These observations are in line with Slobin’s remark that the division between satellite- and verb-framed languages
is rather a continuum (Slobin 1996).

The study offers an in-depth analysis of motion descriptions in Polish and English, i.e. a typologically related pair of languages that differ in manner salience, by Polish second language users of English. 20 bilingual Polish-English speakers were recruited among senior year students in an English-medium university programme and compared with Polish and English monolingual control groups. All the participants were asked to retell in detail a fragment of a Canary Row cartoon. The elicited narratives were analyzed to identify all manner and path components. The results show that the L2 users overuse path verbs in their L2 English and underuse common verbs like go and get that are unspecified for path or manner. While such  behaviour constitutes evidence of L1→L2 transfer, it is argued that it is also target-like and provides evidence of desensitization to manner cues in attentional processing related to L2 production.