A Study Of The Acquisition Of English Motion Events Expressions For Chinese Learners From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

As the motion is a common concept for human beings, motion events expression in languages has been studied for a long time and people have made a great deal of academic achievements up to now. Talmy(2000)’s dichotomy on motion events based on lexicalization patterns is the typical theory among them. In his view, there are two categories of languages across the world: one is the satellite-framed language and the other is the verb-framed language based on different features of motion events expression in linguistic construction. In the theoretical background of Talmy’s dichotomy on motion events, this paper aims to explore the prominent features of English motion events expressions for Chinese learners in second language acquisition. It is a study combined with quantitative and qualitative research. As a motion event expression consists of linguistic representations and non-linguistic representations in conceptual level, the whole study is divided into two parts: a corpus-based analysis of motion events with the corpus retrieval of an interlanguage corpus CLEC by reference to an English native language corpus COCA, and a case study analyzing the co-speech gestures and speech in motion events by recording motion events description of three Chinese English learners in a story-retelling task of a cartoon called The Canary Row. The consequences in the acquisition of English motion events for Chinese learners are analyzed under the perspective of conceptual transfer in SLA, a new interdisciplinary research area in language transfer. The majorfindings in the study are:Firstly, in the expression of path information in motion events, as English and Chinese share the same concepts of path verbs, Chinese English learners express all kinds of path verbs with comparatively same frequency as English native speakers.However, Chinese learners prefer to use path verbs go and come frequently in the form of go/come + path satellites/preposition as it contains more conceptual meaning in Chinese from the conceptual level. As for the overuse of path satellites and prepositions like to, back, into in specific collocations sometimes, it is because in Chinese conceptual level, people always bind the final state of a motion event to main verb as a whole, in the linguistic form of V + dao in Chinese, which is equal to path satellite or path preposition in English. In the English expression, the occurrence of conceptual transfer leads to the overuse of path satellites and prepositions.Secondly, in the expression of manner information in motion events, Chinese English learners are good at the use of basic manner verbs, like jump, run and walk in English. However, they have difficulties in the acquisition of manner verbs with more fine-grained information, which are treated as the second-tier manner verbs, like zoom,creep and trudge in English. It is because there are differences between Chinese and English in the conceptualization of manner information in motion events. Chinese is a typical analytic language, which interprets the fine-grained manner information as a combination of a basic motion behavior and its specific manner of motion whereas English is a typical synthetic language, which conceptualizes the fine-grained manner information as a whole. In consequence, English has much more manner verbs in Chinese. The occurrence of conceptual transfer makes it difficult to learn more manner verbs for Chinese English learners.Thirdly, by the analysis of the relationship of co-speech gestures and speech in motion events, the paper explores the conceptualization of motion events expression in Chinese English learners. The results show that Chinese and English both belongs to category of satellite-framed languages in Talmy’s typology. Also, as English is a highly manner-salient language compared with Chinese, there is conceptual transfer by the expression in gestures in the acquisition of English motion events for Chineselearners.In sum, the thesis has an overall study of the interlanguage for Chinese learners,unlike previous studies which only focus on the comparison and contrast of English and Chinese in motion events expression. What’s more, the addition of co-speech gestures makes it possible to know the features of conceptualization in motion events for Chinese learners. Undoubtedly, conceptual transfer plays an important role in the acquisition of motion events expression for Chinese learners. All these findings can contribute to related English teaching practice in second language acquisition.