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Part of
Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and applications
Edited by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
[Human Cognitive Processing 59] 2017
► pp. 301–328

Chapter 11
Motion event contrasts in Romance languages

Deixis in Spanish as a second language

| University of East Anglia

This chapter explores language contrasts among Romance languages in the semantic domain of motion events. Romance languages are verb-framed languages in the typology of motion events by Talmy (1985, 2000). However, some intratypological differences have been observed among them, regarding the expression of certain components such as Path, Cause, and Deixis. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it discusses how these semantic contrasts have implications for the theoretical framework of the study of motion events. Second, it examines how these intratypological contrasts impact on the acquisition of a second language by speakers of a typologically-close and genetically-related language. This is illustrated with examples from Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French and Italian.

Keywords: caused-motion, Deixis, Path, Romance languages, second language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Romance language contrasts in the domain of motion
    • 2.1Path description in French and Spanish
    • 2.2Path description in Italian
    • 2.3Deixis in Romance languages
    • 2.4Implications of these language contrasts for the theory
  • 3.Impact of intratypological variation among Romance languages on second language acquisition
    • 3.1Crosslinguistic influence
    • 3.2Re-thinking for speaking
    • 3.3Crosslinguistic influence among Romance languages
  • 4.Path in L2 Spanish by French and Italian native speakers
    • 4.1Plus-ground analysis
    • 4.2Plus-ground with more than one element
    • 4.3Caused-motion constructions
  • 5.Deixis in Spanish as a second language
    • 5.1Results: Quantitative analysis
    • 5.2Results: Qualitative analysis
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions and further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.59.13hij
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