Motion events in L2 narratives by Japanese and Chinese learners of English

Abstract

This study investigated how native speakers of Japanese (verb-framed language) and Chinese (satellite-framed leaning language) acquire narratives of motion events in L2 English (satellite-framed language). Focusing on manner salience, cause salience, path segments, path conflation, ground salience and scene-setting, this study examined the written narratives of motion events in English produced by native speakers of Japanese and Chinese, in comparison to native speakers of English. The results demonstrated both the transfer of and the restructuring of L1 motion events schemata in acquiring L2 narratives of motion events. More importantly, this study found that manner salience, cause salience and path conflation posed greater acquisition difficulty for L2 learners than the rest of the semantic components, which might be attributed to the different status of the semantic components in the schemata of motion events, as well as to the acquisition difficulty of the target linguistic structures absent in the source languages.