Encoding Voluntary Motion Events In Verbal And Nonverbal Contexts

The spatial domain remains a long-standing debate.Languages differ typologically in motion lexicalization.English prominently expresses Manner of motion in the verb root and Path of motion in the particle,while Chinese can typically encode both Manner and Path in a verb compound.Previous studies frequently focus on Indo-European languages either in the spatial language or cognition.This study extends the range of the spatial domain by investigating whether learning an additional language that is typologically different from the mother tongue affects the expressive production and overt preferences for Manner/Path in the context of the voluntary motion events.The verbal experiment concerning utterance density and information focus shows that English learners of Chinese turned out to be an inter-language,though slightly restricted by the source language,bearing much resemblance to the target system.Specifically,L2 learners could make good use of the Chinese RVCs.Developmental tendency was observed across proficiency levels.The non-verbal similarity-judgment experiment revealed that participants of monolinguals and bilinguals were overwhelmingly Path-oriented.Since Path was the ‘basic motion' proposed by Talmy,L2 learners of the lower proficiency levels chose the lowest number of Manner while the advanced L2 learners showed a largest number of the Manner.It indicated a language-specific developmental tendency as the target language proficiency advanced.Overall,our results provide references for the linguistic relativity,suggesting that L2 learners have access to a typologically different language in the linguistic level.The results show a conceptual paradigm: the higher the proficiency of the L2 learners,the greater number of Manner-match preferences.