L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner

On Uzbek converb constructions expressing motion events

Converbs, which are widely used in Turkic languages, constitute a number of converb constructions conveying aspectual and Aktionsart meanings. These constructions, often called 'auxiliary verb constructions', have been well studied. In this article, however, which is restricted to Uzbek, we will study in detail a different kind of converb construction, that until today mainly went unnoticed by turcologists: the 'converb construction of motion' (CCM). It is defined as a succession of verbs, linked with the converb suffix -(i)b, in which each verb expresses a separate semantic component of the same motion event. Our research based on a monolingual Uzbek corpus showed that three Main Types and one Extra Type can be distinguished. These are made up of verbs belonging to well-defined semantic verbal categories, combinations of which constitute specific subtypes. It can be concluded that Uzbek has an elaborate system of CCMs

Tactical Generation in a Free Constituent Order Language

This paper describes tactical generation in Turkish, a free constituent order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic, focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints of the text flow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured finite state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit system, developed at Carnegie Mellon University--Center for Machine Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme selection and handles morphographemic processes.Comment: gzipped, uuencoded postscript fil

Lexicalisation Patterns of Rendering Path Descriptions in Polish Translation from English

The article pertains to the powerful bi-categorial typology of languages developed by Talmy. The researcher generally points at satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages in terms of conflating the semantic component of path, either to a satellite placed near a manner verb or to a verb root. Slobin expanded that typology by introducing a class of equipollently framed languages. English and Polish are both satellite-framed languages. Nonetheless, while English colloquially expresses ideas with constructions lexicalising precise path through satellites, Polish translation renders the path, neutralises it, changes it, or omits the path conveyed by the original version, which is illustrated by this paper

Variation in motion events: Theory and applications

This chapter analyses the role of intratypological and dialectal variation in the lexicalisation of motion events (Talmy 1991, 2000) and its application to second language acquisition. The first part discusses intratypological variation with respect to the semantic component of Path and proposes a cline of Path salience on the basis of twenty-one languages. Then, it describes dialectal variation in Spanish and Aragonese. Results show that dialects within these two Romance languages differ in the type of linguistic resources they use as well as in their quality and quantity. The second part briefly reviews some L2 problematic areas that can benefit from these approaches such as conceptual transfer, deixis, and idiomaticity. Examples are drawn from L2 Spanish and L2 Basque

On the path of time: Temporal motion in typological perspective

The Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors have provided a fertile testing ground for the psychological reality of space–time metaphors. Despite this, little research has targeted the linguistic patterns used in these two mappings. To fill that gap, the current study uses corpus data to examine the use of motion verbs in two typologically different languages, English and Spanish. We first investigated the relative frequency of the two metaphors. Whereas we observed no difference in frequency in the Spanish data, our findings indicated that in English, Moving Time expressions are more prevalent than are Moving Ego expressions. Second, we focused on the patterns of use of the verbs themselves, asking whether well-known typological patterns in the expression of spatial motion would carry over to temporal motion. Specifically, we examined the frequencies of temporal uses of path and manner verbs in English and in Spanish. Contra the patterns observed in space, we observed a preference for path verbs in both languages, with this preference more strongly evident in English than in Spanish. In addition, our findings revealed greater use of motion verbs in temporal expressions in Spanish compared to English. These findings begin to outline constraints on the aspects of spatial conceptualization that are likely to be reused in the conceptualization of time