Chapter published in:
Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 103–122

Chapter 5
Language-specificity in motion expression

Early acquisition in Korean compared to French and English

| 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.
Keywords: development of Motion event expression, language-specificity in acquisition, acquisition of Korean, spatial semantics and syntax, Manner adverbs
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
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.06cho
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