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 presents some difficulties in L2 learning, which seems to rely on the simple event construction of each language. As Spanish is an instance of verb-framed languages (Talmy, 2000), the verb tends to codify result, whereas English is an instance of satellite-framed languages in which the verb tends to codify manner. If result needs to be codified, English resorts to the English Resultative Construction (ERC), a double predicate construction with a PP that codifies change of location in Path-ERC(1) Bill walked into the roomor with an AP that codifies change of state in Property-ERC:(2) Mary danced Peter tiredIn addition, Fake Reflexive-ERC codify either change of location (PP) or state (AP) as in:(3) The baby cried himself asleepERC has no mirror equivalent in Spanish for all its subtypes. Yet, Spanish and English share a double predicate structure, the Depictive Construction (DC), that does not codify result: (4) He returned the book damaged(5) El devolvió el libro dañadoTherefore, we wonder to what extent the different ERC are learned by Spanish native speakers who learn English as L2 (EFL). We aim at identifying i) if the different subtypes of ERC are learned in a given sequence; and ii) if this sequence occurs, to identify if it is modulated by the structure’s departure from the Spanish pattern and proficiency level. We conducted an online Sentence Comprehension Task designed to measure the interpretation of the three types of ERC and the DC by native speakers of Spanish with different levels ofEFL. Results indicate that: i) DC are more easily comprehended due to L1 influence on L2; ii) the comprehension of Path-ERC show no significant difference with the DC; iii) proficiency improves the comprehension of all ERC, but this effect interacts with type of ERC (Path > Property >Fake Reflexive).LINK DE ACCESO A LA PRESENTACIÓN: https://view.genial.ly/6076eb9c05f9c10d77db7c22/presentation-motion-2021