Path, Ground and Manner in Spanish-Swedish bilinguals: the effects of a second language in the patterns for motion encoding of a first language

Abstract

This study addresses how Spanish-Swedish early and late bilinguals express motion

events in their inherited language or first language: Spanish. We draw on the idea that the

habitual conceptualization of events also underlies both L2 usage (Flecken et al., 2014: 51)

and L1 usage in bilinguals (Bylund and Jarvis, 2011). Drawing both on studies about second

language acquisition and bilingualism we aim to study how the typological patterns for

motion encoding of the L2 (a satellite-framed language) may impact on motion encoding in the

L1 (a verb-framed language), which the group under study has had but a reduced contact

with while growing up in Sweden. Considering this fact and starting off from the assumption

that an early age of break with the L1 environment has an impact on how motion events are

described in an L1 (Bylund, 2009), we aim to outline the conceptualization of motion events of

two groups of bilinguals, in all 31 subjects, and the different sorts of transfer phenomena that

may affect their speech. Oral narratives produced by the bilinguals have been compared to

two control groups of Spanish and Swedish monolinguals and then been examined in order

to analyze their conflation patterns regarding Manner of motion, Path and Ground information.

Our results have lead us finally to conclude that both the individuals’ age of second

language acquisition and their length of residence in the L2 environment have affected their

L1 conceptualization patterns