| Description |
Research on the application of cognitive linguistics to L2 pedagogy has thrived in the past twenty years, yielding important results (e.g., Achard & Niemeier 2004; Masuda, Arnett, & Labarca 2015; Tyler 2012). The encoding of motion events is a central theme in this research since it addresses important linguistic features (e.g., deixis, manner of motion, auxiliary selection) which call into question key aspects of the way we conceptualize and encode experience. Our study contributes to the rich current research on L2 learning and teaching of motion event constructions with an analysis of the selection of the perfective auxiliary with Italian motion verbs, a topic that remains under-investigated. Italian motion verbs are divided into two sub-category: unaccusative (e.g., arrivare ‘to arrive’, uscire ‘to go out’) which select the auxiliary essere ‘to be’, and unergative (e.g., camminare ‘to walk’, passeggiare ‘to stroll’) which, on the other hand, select the auxiliary avere ‘to have’. The selection of the auxiliary also reflects the semantic characteristics of the different motion verbs involved (e.g., agentivity, telicity; cf. Sorace 2000) and the image schemas they reflect (Russi 2023). In particular, telicity concerns the presence or absence of a boundary (or telos) delimiting the represented event, which is part of the lexical semantics of unaccusatives (e.g. ‘going out’) whereas it is missing in that of unergatives expressing manner of motion (e.g. ‘strolling’). Our study constitutes the first investigation of the modalities of the acquisition of Italian motion events by Czech and Slovak native-speaker students vis-a-vis American English native-speaker students. Our analysis is based on data collected in undergraduate lower division courses of Italian language at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and Masaryk University (Czech Republic). Data collection was cross-sectional and based on a well-established elicitation technique in acquisitional research, namely a descriptive-narrative task developed around Mayer’s (1969) ‘Frog story’ (Berman & Slobin 1994; Slobin 2004; among many others). This text consists of 29 black-and-white drawings showing the adventures of a child and his dog searching for a frog that has run away from them. The visualizations of the plot provide the reader ample space for a detailed description of what is happening (Slobin 2004). Concerning the phenomenon under analysis (i.e., verbs denoting motion events), we selected 20 images which clearly illustrate a change in movement. During class, students were first given five minutes to independently reconstruct the story; then, while they continued to observe the selected images, students were asked by the interviewers questions about the images using verbs in the past tense only; the basic starting question was “Describe what you think happened and why”. The students’ answers were audio recorded, subject to informed consent, then transcribed into text for analysis. Preliminary analysis of the data shows, for both English-speaking and Czech/Slovak-speaking learners, cases of correct auxiliary selection, cases of overgeneralisation of one at the expense of the other, and cases of omission, according to a distribution that partly reflects the characteristics of the learners' respective L1s, and partly could be explained by the characteristics of the motion event involved.
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