This study investigates the developmental path followed by L2 Chinese learners to express motion events and identifies the difficulties which prevent them to achieve native speakers’ level. A similar investigation has been previously carried out by Wu Shuling (2011): unlike Wu’s research, which dealt with English speakers, we investigate how Italian learners of Chinese come to use Directional Complements (DCs). According to the cognitive linguistics framework (Talmy, 1985, 1991, 2000), Italian is considered a verb-framed language whereas Chinese and English are considered satellite-framed languages; however, as a serial verb language, Chinese encodes path differently from English and it has been also classified as equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004, 2006). A controlled composition task and a picture-cued written task were administered to 24 Italian Chinese learners and to 9 Chinese native speakers to elicit their knowledge and mastery of DCs. Analysis of the data was carried out with a particular emphasis on the critical aspects, such as the syntactic pattern of DCs, the typological features in path encoding, and the dual function of DCs as path satellites and as independent verbs. Keywords:
Romagnoli, C., Luzi, E. (2012). Acquiring Chinese Directional Complements: paths, methods and difficulties. In Selected papers of the 2nd International Conference on Chinese as a second language research (pp. 19-36).
Acquiring Chinese Directional Complements: paths, methods and difficulties
ROMAGNOLI, Chiara;
2012-01-01
Abstract
This study investigates the developmental path followed by L2 Chinese learners to express motion events and identifies the difficulties which prevent them to achieve native speakers’ level. A similar investigation has been previously carried out by Wu Shuling (2011): unlike Wu’s research, which dealt with English speakers, we investigate how Italian learners of Chinese come to use Directional Complements (DCs). According to the cognitive linguistics framework (Talmy, 1985, 1991, 2000), Italian is considered a verb-framed language whereas Chinese and English are considered satellite-framed languages; however, as a serial verb language, Chinese encodes path differently from English and it has been also classified as equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004, 2006). A controlled composition task and a picture-cued written task were administered to 24 Italian Chinese learners and to 9 Chinese native speakers to elicit their knowledge and mastery of DCs. Analysis of the data was carried out with a particular emphasis on the critical aspects, such as the syntactic pattern of DCs, the typological features in path encoding, and the dual function of DCs as path satellites and as independent verbs. Keywords:I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
