Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
It has been generally accepted that the concept of space plays an important role in ourdaily life and the spatial experience forms our earliest and most essential practice in humanlife (Johnson, 1987; Landau & Zukowski, 2003). Although our understanding towardsspace is likely to be universal, for we have something in common biologically, particularlythe visual and the haptic-kinaesthetic system, languages do make some differences in thethe process of space conceptualizing (Papafragou, Hulbert & Trueswell, 2008). That is tosay, with regard to the same space experience, we universally have a more or lessperception and understanding of it, however, special attention that a native speaker istrained to pay to and the priority order chosen in expressions by narrates varies acrosslanguages. Till today, many researchers have carried out a number of studies on therelationship between space and language (Talmy, 1985, 2000; Lakoff, 1987; Choi &Bowerman, 1991; Bloom, Peterson, Nadel & Garrett, 1996; Bowerman, 1996; Slobin,1996a, 2004; Hickmann & Robert, 2006; Wu, S. 2011; Ji, Hendriks & Hickmann, 2011a,2011b;), stating that the different characteristics of language can influence, if not determine,the way language speakers conceptualize or lexicalize the space experience, showinguniqueness of the language.Motion event, the core aspect of the understanding of space by human beings, is the hot topic discussed by scholars at home and abroad in recent years, no matter in terms oftheoretical researches or of empirical studies of language acquisition (Talmy, 1985, 1991,2000; Slobin, 1996a, 1996b, 2003, 2004; Bowerman & Choi, 2001). Moreover, a lot ofresearches show that the semantic domain of motion event is well suitable for theinvestigation of cross-language differences in how speakers map semantic informationonto linguistic form (see Goschler & Stefanowitsh, 2013; Han & Cadierno, 2010; Pavlenko,2011). Most existing relevant studies investigating how language users express spaceevents are mainly based on Talmy’s motion event typology (1985, 1991, 2000). Talmystates that a complete motion event generally consists of six semantic components, namely,‘Figure’ (hereafter F), ‘Ground’ (hereafter G), ‘Motion’, ‘Path’ (hereafter P), ‘Manner’(hereafter M) and ‘Cause’ (hereafter C), among which P appears to be the most importantcomponent as the core schema, playing a role of linkage, connecting the Figure, Groundand Manner together.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
According to Johnson (1987), Motion event referring to an entity which moves from aplace to another place or keeps moving in a certain boundary, is the earliest, most basic andpervasive event in our daily life and it can be a good point accessing to the investigation ofthe relationship between space and language. Existing studies have attested that languagespecificity has an impact on language acquisition (Allen et al., 2007; Bowerman & Choi,2001, 2003; Ji, 2015). Specially, after a careful scrutiny of relevant literature, we find thatno matter in terms of research quantity or of inconclusive statements, it is worth to carryout a study to investigate how Chinese English learners acquire L2 and whether and towhat extent learners’ L1 influences SLA. Seeing that the present study focuses on ChineseEnglish learners, the final implications will benefit learners and can somewhat help toavoid the pitfall in the process of L2 acquisition. In addition, this topic is chosen on thebasis of comprehensive survey of relevant studies, which in some ways complements theresearch gap. To be more specific, there are several theoretical and practical significance asfollows:1) Firstly, on the theoretical side, the present study, based on Talmy’s framingtypology and Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, aims to explore how Chinese EFLlearners express motion events in L2 by eliciting oral language production
