How French learners of Chinese L2 express motion events in narratives

Abstract

The present study examines the ways in which French intermediate learners of Mandarin Chinese express motion events in the framework of event conflation proposed by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000b). The procedure used is the analysis of an oral corpus of French L2 learners of Chinese and adult native Chinese and French speakers consisting of a verbal production task based on the wordless picture book “ Frog, where are you? ”. This analysis was carried out at three levels. At the conceptual level, the results reveal that L2 learners, like French L1 speakers, express more static and less dynamic relations than Chinese L1 speakers. At the semantic and linguistic levels, the results show that L2 learners’ clauses were semantically less dense than those of Chinese L1 speakers; the former also express more Path and less Manner and Cause than the latter and the linguistic components chosen to express those semantic components are also different. These findings suggest that the difference between Chinese L1 speakers and L2 learners occurs at the conceptualization level (Levelt 1989).