Clausal-Packaging of Path of Motion in Second Language Acquisition of Russian and Spanish

Clausal-Packaging of Path of Motion in the Second Language Acquisition of Russian and Spanish Kawai Chui Hsiang-lin Yeh Wen-Chun Lan Yu-Han Cheng National Chengchi University, NO.64, Sec.2, ZhiNan Rd.,Wenshan District,Taipei City 11605 Taiwan (R.O.C.) kawai@nccu.edu.tw verayeh@nccu.edu.tw wenchun@nccu.edu.tw 101555001@ nccu.edu.tw Abstract Given that Mandarin is a verb-serializing language, Russian a satellite-framed language, and Spanish a verb-framed language, the current study examines Mandarin college students’ acquisition of Russian and Spanish as L2, to understand the strength of L1 preferences for expression of PATH on Russian and Spanish majors’ second language acquisition in Taiwan. Based on oral narrative data, the study focuses on lexicalization and concatenation preferences in L1 and L2 languages. First, Russian majors’ morphosyntactic preferences show that L1 Mandarin affects students’ acquisition of Russian at the elementary level. However, in the acquisition of Spanish, learners’ native language does not hold strength; Spanish majors’ morphosyntactic patterning conforms more to that in L2 Spanish for both elementary and intermediate levels. Moreover, the Spanish majors appear to be developing their L2 concatenation patterning in a way that is divergent from the target L2 Spanish. The findings provide a deeper understanding of the different degrees of L1 influence on learners’ acquisition of L2 Russian and of L2 Spanish at various levels of proficiency. 1 Introduction The packaging of PATH and MANNER of motion at the level of the clause has been discussed since the typological distinction between ‘satellite-framed’ languages and ‘verb- framed’ languages was proposed (Talmy, 1985, 1991), in that the former incorporate motion with MANNER in the main verb and express PATH with a verb particle or a satellite, whereas the latter incorporate motion with PATH in the main verb and express MANNER in the subordinated verb. Later, Slobin (2004: 249) added a group of ‘equipollently-framed’ languages to the typology, where “[p]ath and manner are expressed by equivalent grammatical forms” and the typical construction type for verb-serializing languages is MANNER VERB + PATH VERB. Mandarin Chinese, as a verb-serializing language in both spoken and written discourse (Slobin, 2000, 2004; Huang and Tanangkingsing, 2005; Chen, 2007; Chen and Guo, 2009; Chui, 2009), belongs to the equipollently-framed group. The use of manner- path verbs such as fēi-chū ‘fly-exit’ or manner- path-deictic verbs such as fēi-chū-qù ‘fly-exit- out’ are common in Mandarin oral narratives and daily conversations (Chui, 2009, 2012). Russian is a satellite-framed language and Spanish is a verb-framed language (Talmy, 1985, 1991; Slobin 2004). Together with Mandarin, the three languages have their own language-specific lexicalization patterns for the expression of motion events, as illustrated by the following examples from Slobin (2004: 224). The appearance of the movement of an owl is encoded by the manner-path serial verb fēi-chū in Mandarin, by vy-skočila ‘jump’ – a manner verb with the path prefix vy- in Russian, and by the path verb sale ‘exit’ in Spanish. Mandarin: Fei1-chu1 yi1 zhi1 mao1 tou2 ying1. (=Fly out one owl.) Russian: Tam vy-skočila sova. (=There out-jumped owl.) Spanish: Sale un buho. (=Exits an owl.) forms “Cross-linguistic differences in surface and accompanying …

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