Clausal-packaging of path of motion in Mandarin learners’ acquisition of Russian and Spanish

Abstract

本文探討台灣大學生如何以俄語和西班牙語表達移動途徑，以瞭解母語對初級和中級外語學習者之影響，及探討學習俄語和西班牙語是否存有差異。本研究使用口語敘事語料分析三個語言在構詞、語法和數量上如何表達途徑。結果顯示俄語初級學習者受中文影響而多使用途徑動詞，但西班牙語學習者卻不受影響。此外，在子句範疇內俄語初級學習者大多表達一類途徑資料，而西班牙語學習者大多表達兩類。研究結果呈現不同面向的跨語言轉移。

Given that Mandarin is a verb-serializing language, Russian a satellite-framed language, and Spanish a verb-framed language, the current study examines Mandarin college students` acquisition of Russian and of Spanish to understand the strength of preferences for expression of Path in Mandarin on learners` foreign language acquisition in Taiwan, and whether there is any cross-linguistic difference between the acquisition of the two foreign languages. Utilizing data from oral narratives, the study focuses on the morphosyntactic and concatenation preferences in Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. First, Russian majors` morphosyntactic preferences demonstrate that Mandarin affects students` acquisition of Russian at the elementary level. However, learners` first language does not hold strength in the acquisition of Spanish. Second, deviations from learners` Mandarin were found and appear to be language-specific, in that elementary learners of Russian produced a lot more one-path-element clauses, and learners of Spanish rather preferred two-path-element clauses. The findings as a whole provide a deeper understanding of the various degrees of crosslinguistic transfer on Mandarin learners` acquisition of two typologically different foreign languages at two levels of proficiency.