Spatial conceptualization in L1: a contribution to language-cognition debate

The study focuses on the expression of motion events in oral narratives produced by English, French, Italian and German adult native speakers (10 informants per group). Data were collected by means of the “Frog Story” (Mayer, 1969) and a cartoon of the Polish series “Reksio’”(Marszalek, 1963). Our analysis investigates the way native speakers conceptualize and code linguistically motion events and the impact of typological properties during linguistic productions (Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis Slobin, 1996), given the differences between the languages considered. According to Talmy (1985, 2000), English and German are satellite-framed languages (Manner/Cause in verb, Path in a satellite), whereas Italian and French are verb-framed languages (Path in verb, Manner/Cause, if expressed, outside the verb). Globally, our study confirms the intertypological variation between S-languages and V-languages (a great attention to Manner and/or Cause in the main verb + path particles) but it also stresses an intratypological variation with respect to Italian and French: only Italian provides some satellite constructions (andare via = go away, correre via = run away etc.; cf. also Simone, 1997; Iacobini & Fagard, 2011; Anastasio, 2018, 2019), especially in the verbalization of some specific scenes of the tasks proposed, which require a ‘caused motion’ construction (it. tirare su = pull up) or a boundary crossing constraint (saltare via for ‘jump out’). Even though each language disposes of different options to express a motion event, we suggest that the co-existence of two strategies of motion encoding – stronger in Italian than in French (verb-particle constructions are totally absent in our French data) – makes Italian language a hybrid framed system and, consequently, as a high-path language within the cline of V-languages. We shall evaluate both the impact of typological differences on linguistic productions and the possible in progress changes in the languages considered. References Anastasio, S. 2018. L’expression de la référence à l’espace en italien et en français L2. Une étude comparative. Phd Dissertation, Université de Paris 8, Paris. Anastasio, S. 2019. L’expression du déplacement en italien L2. Perspectives typologiques et psycholinguistiques. Language, Interaction and Acquisition (10)2, 204-228. Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company. Iacobini, C. & Fagard, B. 2011. A diachronic approach to variation and change in the typology of motion event expression. A case study: from Latin to Romance. Faits de Langue, Les Cahiers 3, 151-171. Simone, R. 1997. Esistono verbi sintagmatici in italiano?. In T. De Mauro & V. Lo Cascio (eds.), Lessico e grammatica. Teorie linguistiche e applicazioni lessicografiche. Bulzoni: Roma, pp. 155- 170. Slobin, D. 1996. From ‘Thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity: Vol. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70-96. Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and Syntactic Description III: Grammatical Categories and Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57-149. Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge MA: MIT PRESS.