Chapter 1 Introduction
Motion events, which typically involve an entity moving from one place toanother, are among the earliest, most basic and pervasive events in our lives (Johnson,1987). We move around the world every day, changing our perspective relative topeople and objects around us, and from birth forward we experience the movementof ourselves and others.Each language has many different means for talking about objects and theirmotion through space, but one of them is more characteristic than others. Accordingto Talmy (2000: 27)，an expression of motion event is characteristic in a language if(1) it is colloquial in style，rather than literary or stilted; (2) it is frequent inoccurrence in speech, rather than only occasional; and (3) it is pervasive, rather thanlimited—that is, a wide range of semantic notions are expressed in this type. Inrecent years, there has been growing interest in the linguistic encodings of motionevents across languages. Linguistic research provides a rich characterization of thelexicalization of motion events in different languages. It is generally presumed thatthere is a close tie between cognitive representations of motion events on the onehand and the semantics of verbs on the other hand. According to Talmy (1985)，theterm 'lexicalization' means the way experience is rendered into languages via thesemantic content of lexical items that are used to express experiential categories.Cognitive models of events that account for how humans (and perhaps other animals)represent motion events mentally. Therefore, the mental representation of motionevents is what the term ‘ conceptualization‘ concerns about.
Research on typology of language has revealed that language differ with respectto their characteristic expression of motion events. The present study examines thelexicalization and conceptualization patterns of compound motion events of nativeChinese and English speakers as well as Chinese EFL learners in spoken narratives.Story-retelling method was adopted. Participants were asked to retell the story after viewing the Pear Story video which has sound effects, but no word. It lasts about sixminutes, which tells a story that a child steals pears with his bike, and falls downwhen hitting a stone on the road, then some others children pass by and help himcollecting the pears . 72 native Chinese speakers were asked to retell in English first,and then in Chinese，and 32 native English speakers were requested to narrate inEnglish. Then, all the texts were pided into clauses and coded, according to theseven compound motion events episodes selected in the story, all the compoundmotion events in the text are identified and marked up. The coding system includedmotion verbs, linking devices，and ground information，which were later searched bya software to check the frequency of occurrence.
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Chapter 2 Literature review
2.1 Motion events
There has been a long tradition in the study of event perception, eventrecognition, event memory, event conceptualization, ard event segmentation.However, what is an event? Generally speaking, event is anything that happens, or iscontemplated as happening. According to Kim (1973: 8), an event is a concreteobject exemplifying a property at a time.Among those different kinds of events, motion events play central roles inpeople's daily lives because motion is a primary experiential domain that pertains touniversality. There are many studies devoted to the description of motion events inlanguage and to their representation in the brain. This plethora of concerns andapplications is indicative of the prima facie centrality of the notion of motion eventsin our conceptual system. However, there are some important questions to beclarified. For example, can we identify a core notion of motion events that ispreserved across disciplines? Firstly, we look at the meaning of motion. However, change-of-location cannot precisely catch the essence of motionevents, because it can be seen as a kind of change-of-state, a sub-domain in a biggroup of events, which comprises different kinds of events that have thecharacteristic ‘change over time'.Change of location is one of two subtypes of how we basically conceptualizemotion (Talmy, 2000: 35-37). Change of location is also called translational motionby Talmy. In translational motion, a physical (animate or inanimate) objectundergoes a shift in locationfrom one location in space to one or more othergiven locations. The other subtype of motion is what Talmy calls self-containedmotion. In self-contained motion, an object remains at a given location and themovement of the object does not change its basic location. This typically involvesmovements such as rotation, oscillation, dilation, wiggling, and yet othernon-translational forms of motion.
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2.2 Talmy's Motion Events Theory
Talmy (2000: 25) treats a situation containing motion and the continuation of astationary location alike as a motion event. Unlike Talmy's dichotomy, Hendriks et al.(2004) propose three sub-categories: 'static general localisation', 'dynamic generallocalisation' and ‘change of localisation，events, each of which is explained below; Here, the Figure (Reskio) is located in relation to the edge of the lake, and thelocative relationship which holds between the Figure and Ground is presented asstable and unchanging: this is encoded by the inflected form of the verb etre ('be').Example (2) is similar to (1) in that the Figure remains within the boundaries of theGround entity. The crucial difference, however, is the Figure's constant motionwithin these boundaries. This leads us to example (3)，in which a boundary-crossingevent does take place: the little girl is in the process of leaving one location (thewater) to arrive in another (out of the water). Indeed, it is necessary to maintain apision between locative events in which the Figure is in motion and those in whichit is not. Actually, Hendriks et al.'s (2004) categorization is not contradictory toTalmy's classification: ‘dynamic general localisation’ and ‘change of localization’can be considered as dynamic motion events and static general localization equals tostationary location in Talmy's theory.
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Chapter 3 Research Methodology..........26
3.1Research questions........26
3.2Participants........27
3.3Material........27
3.4Data collection........28
3.5Data coding........28
Chapter 4 Results........29
4.1Motion verb use: Types........29
4.2Motion verb use: Tokens........29
4.3Motion verb constructions........32
4.4Description of ground elements........32
4.5Linking devices of compound events........36
Chapter 5 Discussion........37
5.1Similarities and Differences among the conceptualization patterns........37
5.2Similarities and Differences among the lexicalization patterns........38
5.3The relationship of EFL learner's data and the native Chinese's........39
Chapter 5 Discussion
5.1 Similarities and Differences of conceptualization patterns
With respect to the similarities, both the Chinese EFL learners and the nativeEnglish speakers tend to use a great number of manner verbs，with 68 types in theSPEN data and 64 types in the NSSP data, which take 98.7% and 98% respectivelyin the two groups of data. This suggest that the Chinese EFL learners may haveacquired the use of compound motion events in that they used it in the same way asnative English speakers did in their spontaneous speech. The various types of motionverbs provide evidence to the affluent verb types in English language and the highfrequency of manner verbs used in narratives reflects the absolute priority of mannerverbs in the narration of motion events, which farther prove that English belongs tothe satellite-framed languages. As Slobin (2000: 110) points out that speakers ofsatellite-framed languages consistently show both higher frequency of use andgreater lexical persity of manner verbs than speakers of verb-framed languages.Moreover, the most frequently used manner verbs in the three groups of data arequite similar, which include motion verbs like pick up, put, fall, take，etc. Thissuggests that people with different language background, no matter using a mothertongue or a foreign language perceive a motion event in a similar way; at least theirmost frequently used motion verbs are quite alike. It is thus different from Inagaki's(2000) result which stated that there was positive transfer from LI to the targetlanguage, and it is also different from Bylund & Jarvis's (2011) points of view that there existed a reverse negative transfer of L2 on L1.
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Conclusion
The present study examined the conceptualization and lexicalization patterns ofcompound motion events of native Chinese and English speakers as well as ChineseEFL learners in spoken narratives by using story-retelling method.We found that the Chinese EFL learners may have acquired the expression ofcompound motion events in English, but still they were influenced by their LI tosome extent. First and foremost, the Chinese EFL learners tend to use a great numberof manner verbs, either in types or tokens, in their spoken narratives of compoundmotion events, as the result shows, 68 types and 234 times of use of manner verbs,but just one type of path verb，as the native English speakers do. The native Chinesespeakers, on the other hand，used both manner verbs and path verbs almost equally intokens in their spoken narratives, with manner verbs slightly more than path verbs，which gives evidence to the idea that Chinese neither belongs to satellite-framedlanguages nor verb-framed languages. It may belong to a third language type, i.e.,equipollently-framed languages. Secondly, the reference to ground elements in theChinese ELF learners' data was quite similar to that of the native English speakers，.The native English speakers tend to provide ground information in a motion event,and the Chinese EFL learners acquired it quite well in this aspect. Thirdly, in termsof choosing linking devices, the Chinese EFL learners showed the influence from LI,with less use of the linking word “and”.
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References (omitted)