Motion Event Encoding In English By Chinese Learners Of Senior High School ——A Windowing Of Attention Approach

Motion events are one of the key studies in cognitive semantics.Based on the different lexicalization patterns of path,Talmy（2000）divides the world’s languages into two main categories,satellite-framed language and verb-framed language,both of which are represented by English and Spanish respectively.On this basis,Slobin（2004）and others propose the third language type,the equipollently-framed language,represented by serialising language such as Chinese.This view is widely supported by domestic and international scholars（Cadierno,2006;Hendriks ＆ Hickmann,2011;Kan,2010）.This study is based on Slobin’s “tertiary typology” and his“thinking-for-speaking hypothesis”,using the wordless storybook “Frog,where are you?” video version as experimental material.The students in a sophomore class of a school in X City,K Province were selected as the experimental subject to investigate the characteristics of English motion events encoded by high school students from Chinese backgrounds in three aspects: the allocation of windowing of attention,the use of autonomous verbs and agentive verbs and the use of path verbs and manner verbs.This dissertation attempts to answer three questions:（1）whether there are differences in the distribution of windowing of attention for the expression of motion events between high school students of Chinese background and English native speakers?（2）If so,in what ways are they different?（3）What are the reasons for these differences?It was found that high school students of Chinese background differed significantly from native English speakers in the allocation of windowing of attention for the motion events expression.Although both were biased towards encoding the final windows,English native speakers were more balanced in the allocation of the windowing of attention.And English native speakers used more satellite components to encode motion events’ path expressions,whereas high school students of Chinese background used more verbs than satellite components,but the difference between the two was not significant.This suggests that the influence of Chinese（the native language）（Chinese is an equipollently-framed language and English is a satellite-framed language）has led them to open the windowing of attention and to acquire and use the manner and path verbs of motion events in English differently from English native speakers,so that their English shows many “equipollently-framed language” characteristics similar to those of Chinese.This finding supports Slobin’s“thinking-for-speaking hypothesis”,which states that the specific lexicalization patterns of a language largely determine the specific linguistic resources that native speakers will use and narrate in that language-specific way.By systematically analyzing the allocation of windowing of attention between Chinese high school students and native speakers for the expression of English motion events,this study has implications for language typology research as well as teaching practice of second language.