Chapter 5
Language-specificity in motion expression
Early acquisition in Korean compared to French and English
Soonja Choi | San Diego State University & University of Vienna, Austria
This chapter examines the development of motion expression in two Korean children (1;11 to 4;2), compared to children acquiring French and English (from Hickmann et al. 2009). Korean is a verb-framed language (like French but unlike English which is satellite-framed; cf. Talmy 1985, 2000), and offers the following devices for motion expression: Serial verb constructions (SVC) in which Manner and Path verbs can co-occur within a single clause, and Manner adverbs including mimetics. Analyses show that from two years on, Korean children use SVCs and start producing Manner adverbs (particularly mimetics). As a result, they express more motion information and their motion expression is therefore semantically denser than in French (but less dense than in English). These findings support the view that language-specific features influence children’s motion expression from an early stage.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Grammatical characteristics of motion event expression in Korean
- 2.1Serial Verb Construction (SVC)
- 2.2Manner adverbs
- 3.The present study
- 4.Data and analysis
- 5.Results
- 5.1Utterance Density
- 5.2Development of SVC in Korean
- 5.3Development of Manner adverbs
- 6.Summary and discussion
- 6.1Influence of language-specific grammar
- 6.2General cognitive development
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References
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Choi, Soonja
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Development of Clause Chaining in Korean.
Frontiers in Psychology 11
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