An Empirical Study On Acquisition Of Motion Events By Chinese EFL Learners

From the perspective of cognitive linguistics and based on Talmy's typological framework as well as Slobin's thinking-for-speaking hypothesis,this study tries to investigate how Chinese EFL learnersacquire the expressions of motion events across event types,i.e.,voluntary and caused motion events.Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are adopted and the materials are elicited from video clips.A comparison of motion event expressions between Chinese natives and English natives is in need,which helps to further examinethe language development of learners.Also this study explores the effect of L1 thinking-for-speaking on SLA and further describes the typology of Chinese.Research results show that there are differences between L2 learners and English natives in the motion event expressions.To be specific:1)With regard to voluntary motion events,L2 learnersare influenced by L1 thinking for speaking,tending to provide implicit Path information or to mark general location without extensive acquisition of the target characteristic lexicalization pattern,e.g.,Manner verb + Path satellite in English;As to the types of Manner verbs,comparedwith English natives,both groups of learners overuse first-tiered verbs and underuse second-tiered verbs,however showing a high codability of Manner verbs;In terms of Path elaboration,learners presentcertain traces of L1 transfer as for utterances with PE = 0.The higher the degree of Path elaboration,the greater difficult low-level L2 learners encounter,especially concerning the densest expressions with PE = 3,however,the differences between two groups of learners are not significant.On the whole,learners' language proficiency plays little role in voluntary motion event expressions.2)For caused motion events,learners' language proficiency does matter a lot.In terms of semantic information of Cause,Manner and Path,learners at low-level language proficiency differentiate from English natives significantly while those at high-level only differ from themin the part of Path semantic component.The more complicated processing task of caused motion eventsin target languageis a great challenge for learners,especially for those at low-level language proficiency who are likely to adopt cost-effective means in many cases,substituting voluntary motion events for caused motion events and maximally describing them,thus resulting in semantic loss of Cause;As to Cause verbs,both groups of learners largely employ first-tiered verbs and such usages as “let,make” reflect the thinking for speaking of L1.Moreover,they differ greatly in terms of the tokens of Cause verbs.RegardingPath elaboration,there is an obvious language development between two learner groups.The higher learners' language proficiency level,the more advantages they have in caused motion event expressions,but their degree of second language acquisition is not high enough.In all,this study proves that L1 thinking-for-speaking,to a certain extent,can influence SLA.The lower learners' language proficiency level,the more dependent on L1 learners will be with the increasing complexity of motion event expressing task and obviously both groups should strengthen their oral ability.Furthermore,concerning the similarities and differences between Chinese and English,the study claims that Chinese should be in a mid-way along an S-language and V-languagecontinuum.