How Spanish native speakers comprehend the English Resultative Construction? Differences in the comprehension of change of location and change of state in secondary predicates in English L2

CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA

Reading, Berkshire, Reino Unido

Congreso; Can Motion Event Construal Be Taught or Restructures? Evidence from Bilinguals and L2 Learners (Motion 2021); 2021

Centre of Literacy and Multilingualismo, University of Reading

The Spanish-English contrast presentssome difficulties in L2 learning, which seems to rely on the simple eventconstruction of each language. As Spanish is an instance of verb-framedlanguages (Talmy, 2000), the verb tends to codify result, whereas Englishis an instance of satellite-framed languages in which the verb tends to codify manner.If result needs to be codified, English resorts to the EnglishResultative Construction (ERC), a double predicate construction with a PP thatcodifies change of location in Path-ERC(1)  Billwalked into the roomor with an AP that codifies changeof state in Property-ERC:(2)  Marydanced Peter tiredIn addition, Fake Reflexive-ERCcodify either change of location (PP) or state (AP) as in: (3)  Thebaby cried himself asleep ERC hasno mirror equivalent in Spanish for all its subtypes. Yet, Spanish and Englishshare a double predicate structure, the Depictive Construction (DC), that doesnot codify result: (4)   Hereturned the book damaged(5)   El devolvió el libro dañado Therefore, we wonder to whatextent the different ERC are learned by Spanish native speakers who learnEnglish as L2 (EFL). We aim at identifying i) if the different subtypes of ERC are learned ina given sequence; and ii) if this sequence occurs, to identify if it ismodulated by the structure?s departure from the Spanish pattern and proficiencylevel. We conducted an online SentenceComprehension Task designed to measure the interpretation of the three types ofERC and the DC by native speakers of Spanish with different levels of EFL. Results indicatethat: i) DC are more easily comprehended due to L1 influence on L2; ii) thecomprehension of Path-ERC show no significant difference with the DC; iii) proficiencyimproves the comprehension of all ERC, butthis effect interacts with type of ERC (Path > Property >Fake Reflexive). References: Talmy, Leonard (2000). Toward acognitive semantics, vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press