Verb-Directional Constructions In Chinese EFL Learners’ Spoken Narratives

As one of the most basic conceptual categories, spatial concepts reveal how people perceive, classify and organize various spatial relations around us. The study of spatial language has always been one of the key issues in cognitive linguistics. Previous studies have examined either the motion verbs (e.g. Tamly1985,2000b) or spatial prepositions (e.g. Tyler and Evans2003). But seldom do they adopt a constructional view of point, let alone in second language acquisition researches.From the perspectives of argument structure and Figure-Ground configuration, the present study focuses on verb-directional constructions, and aims to explore the acquisition of such construction by Chinese EFL learners in their English spoken narratives and the potential L1Chinese influence. There are three sets of data elicited through participants’retelling of a silent short film:1)72spoken English narratives by Chinese EFL learners;2)32spoken English narratives by native English speakers; and3)72spoken Chinese narratives. All the data were manually annotated with BFSU Qualitative Coder and analyzed based on an extended contrastive interlanguage analysis model (Xu2013).Results show that Chinese EFL learners differ strikingly from native speakers in expressing the marginal arguments (e.g. Instrument, Source) and show less specificity in describing the detailed features of motion events. Besides, there seems to be a tendency of explicitation of the affected objects (i.e. Theme) in Chinese learners’spoken narratives. As for Figure-Ground configuration, significant distinctions are observed in the use of prepositions. The learners are likely to overlook the derived and peripheral meaning of some prepositions, and constantly resort to their L1Chinese spatial concepts. Based on the analysis of the image schemata of typical constructions, the study also finds that narrators may attend to different aspects of a spatial scene. Pedagogical implications, as well as limitations and directions for future research are discussed.