A Study On Middle School Students’ English Fictive Motion Expressions

Since Talmy’s research in1970’s and early1980’s, cognitive linguists have paid more and more attention to fictive motion in various languages. Fictive motion plays an increasingly important role in language use and understanding. Linguists such as Talmy and Matlock have argued that fictive motion is a fleeting sense of motion and a mentally simulated motion along a path or linear configuration. That motion was called "virtual motion" by Talmy in1983,"extension" by Jakendoff in1983,"abstract motion" by Langacker in1987, and "subjective motion" by Matsumoto in1996. According to Matlock, understanding fictive motion involves mental simulated movement or scanning along a trajectory through imagined space. Thus has done many experiments to study this. Generally speaking, research on fictive motion has so far concentrated on their similarities or differences to factive motion (Talmy,2000) in semantic conceptualization, the nature of fictive motion and cross-linguistic comparison of fictive motion constructions. Their studies have laid a solid foundation for our further research on fictive motion and help us a lot to better understand and process fictive motion structures. However, not enough attention has been paid to the teaching of fictive motion in English or other foreign languages. Furthermore, little efforts has been made to investigate the use of mental simulation or scanning in language teaching.Therefore, based on the study of previous scholars, the present study will connect the fictive motion theories and English teaching. By doing experiments, this paper will investigate middle school students’ use and understanding of fictive motion expressions. Subjects are Grade Two students from Lichuan NO.1Middle School. All have started English for eight years. In this paper, there are two experiments. One is the writing experiment, the other is the drawing task. The first experiment is to study whether students know to use fictive motion structure by given motion verbs. If so, what’s the implication on English teaching. The second experiment is to investigate whether students will draw longer arrows to fictive motion sentences than to non-fictive motion sentences and the role of mental simulated "movement" or "scanning" in helping people know and understand these fictive motion constructions.Based on the data of the experiments, there are two findings:Firstly, in the writing task, over50%of students did use fictive motion structures by the given motion verbs in their writing; About30%of students tried to use this structure in their writing, but they didn’t use it correctly, while some students had no awareness of using motion verbs to describe things. Secondly, in the drawing task, students drew longer arrows to the fictive motion sentences than to the non fictive motion sentences. It follows that people have a different understanding of FM sentences and non-FM sentences.The thesis mainly consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction, introducing topic of the study, significance of the study, data collection and research method, organization of this thesis. The second part is the literature review. I will mainly talk about the relative theories on fictive motion, mental simulation in processing English fictive motion sentences, relative studies on Fictive Motion. The third part is the methodology part, two experiments, including research questions, participants, materials, procedures, analysis. The fourth part will analyze the results and draw a conclusion, then talk about the Fictive Motion’s implication on foreign language teaching. The last part is the conclusion.This paper connects has connected fictive motion with teaching, but it mainly focus on fictive motion in English instead of fictive motion in other languages, so there is a need for further research on fictive motion in other languages and teaching.