Abstract
The present study examines the ways in which French intermediate learners of Mandarin Chinese express motion events in the framework of event conflation proposed by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000b). The procedure used is the analysis of an oral corpus of French L2 learners of Chinese and adult native Chinese and French speakers consisting of a verbal production task based on the wordless picture book “Frog, where are you?”. This analysis was carried out at three levels. At the conceptual level, the results reveal that L2 learners, like French L1 speakers, express more static and less dynamic relations than Chinese L1 speakers. At the semantic and linguistic levels, the results show that L2 learners’ clauses were semantically less dense than those of Chinese L1 speakers; the former also express more Path and less Manner and Cause than the latter and the linguistic components chosen to express those semantic components are also different. These findings suggest that the difference between Chinese L1 speakers and L2 learners occurs at the conceptualization level (Levelt 1989).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Quoted by Ameka and Essegbey (2006: 394).
- 3.
According to Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006: 1), a serial verb construction is a sequence of verbs which act together as a single predicate, without any overt marker of coordination, subordination, or syntactic dependency of any other sort. Serial verb constructions describe what is conceptualized as a single event. They are monoclausal; their intonational properties are the same as those of a monoverbal clause, and they have just one tense, aspect, and polarity value. SVCs may also share core and other arguments. Each component of an SVC must be able to occur on its own. Within an SVC, the individual verbs may have same, or different, transitivity values.
- 4.
See also Li (1997).
- 5.
Their corpus consists of two narration tasks: the first is written, based on short video clips (40 informants), and the second is oral, based on a few minutes of the film “City Lights” by Charlie Chaplin (25 informants).
- 6.
About the Figure’s syntactic positions, see Jerry Packard “Space, Time and Assymmetry in Chinese” in this volume; about Ground expression, see Yao Ruoyu “Expression of the inclusion relationship in contemporary Chinese” and Feng Shengli “The Prosodically Motivated Localizers in Classical Chinese” in this volume.
- 7.
For a proposal of motion morphemes order in Chinese, see Lin (2011).
- 8.
For a complete description of motion prefixes, see Kopecka (2004: 179).
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Arslangul, A. (2015). How French Learners of Chinese L2 Express Motion Events in Narratives. In: Xu, D., Fu, J. (eds) Space and Quantification in Languages of China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10040-1_9
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