The Relationship between Language Proficiency and Neutral Verbs in Motion Event Descriptions

Motion as a universal conceptual domain has intrigued language researchers. The descriptions of motion events, on the other hand, depend on the limits of canonical verbalization patterns of the world languages. Talmy (1985) suggested a typology that classifies world languages into two – verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. While speakers of s-languages use “manner verb + path satellite” constructions in their motion event descriptions, speakers of v-languages reserve the main verb slot to a “path verb” and either leave manner information unmentioned or mention it separately in an adjunct. Meanwhile, Slobin’s (1996) Thinking for Speaking hypothesis proposed that lexicalization patterns are set according to a native language. Once shaped, these patterns may show resilience to change in a second language, especially if the two languages belong to different typologies, causing language learners to have difficulty in reshaping their verbalization patterns according to the target language. Consequently, learners may produce either erroneous utterances or resort to communication strategies to compensate for their lack of proficiency. This study will report motion verbs elicited from an event description task and analyse neutral verbs – verbs that do not indicate manner or path information – as communication strategies. Learners seem to be resorting to neutral verbs when they lack a target manner verb in their lexicon. This tendency may be affected by their level of proficiency in the target language. Therefore, taking neutral verbs in motion event descriptions as the dependent variable and proficiency levels - A2, B1, B2, and C1 (based on CEFR) – as the independent, the study will reveal the relationship between the two via a one-way ANOVA analysis. The findings will be discussed in relation to Slobin’s Thinking for Speaking hypothesis (1996a) as an extension of Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis (1956). Implications for language teachers about the idiosyncratic lexicalization patterns of learners will be presented.