A Matter of Space

A Matter of Space

The Acquisition of Motion Lexicalization Patterns by English and Portuguese learners

Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UGA

Why can you “drive a car” but not “drive your sister to school” in Portuguese?

How can Brazilians visit Japan if they won’t “fly to a place”?

This talk addresses the acquisition of L2 motion encoding lexicalization patterns by late English-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals. By looking into preference ratings by participants (n=192) in three different countries, we analyze how L2 speakers describe motion through space. We identify the locus of difficulty for Brazilians learning English as well as U.S. Americans learning Portuguese. Our results provide an insight into the development of mental representations in late bilinguals (Pavlenko, 2005; Athanasopoulous, 2009; Hasko, 2009) as well as empirical data for the field of Second Language Acquisition and language instruction.

Please, use the back door by the parking lot (instead of the one by the fountain).