Semantic Categorization of Placement Verbs in L1 and L2 Danish and Spanish
This project was financed by the Velux Foundation and by the Spanish Government (MovEs, FFI2013‐45553‐C3‐1‐P). We would like to thank Thomas Nielsen for his help in data transcribing and coding, Toker Doganoglu and Isabel Casas for their help with the statistical analyses of the data, and the reviewers of this manuscript and Lourdes Ortega for their insightful comments. The stimulus materials used in this study were developed under the Put Project: The Cross‐Linguistic Encoding of Placement Events, carried out by Melissa Bowerman, Marianne Gullberg, Asifa Majid, and Bhuvana Narasimhan; both the field manual and stimulus materials for this project can be found at http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2004/put‐project.
Abstract
This study investigates sematic categorization of the meaning of placement verbs by Danish and Spanish native speakers and two groups of intermediate second language (L2) learners (Danish learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish learners of L2 Danish). Participants described 31 video clips picturing different types of placement events. Cluster analyses revealed considerable differences in the semantic categorization of these events in Danish and Spanish as well as learning difficulties for the two learner groups. When Danish and Spanish differ in the number and nature of semantic distinctions, L2 verb meaning reconstruction becomes challenging when moving from a more to a less complex system and vice versa. Both learner groups used noncaused motion verbs, overgeneralized given placement verbs, and tended to use L2 verbs haphazardly.
Number of times cited: 6
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