The Construal of Goal-Oriented Motion Events by Swedish Speakers of L2 Spanish

The current study investigates motion event construal in Swedish speakers of L2 Spanish. In particular, the study examines the encoding of motion endpoints and manner of motion through elicited video clip descriptions of everyday motion event situations. The results show that Swedish learners of Spanish exhibit the same, high endpoint frequencies as their monolingual Swedish peers, thus deviating from the Spanish native pattern. Moreover, the learners used the same amount of manner verbs as Spanish natives, but were more prone to give additional manner information in periphrastic constructions. These findings are interpreted in relation to previous literature on the construal of motion events in L2 learners and the notion of conceptual transfer (Cadierno & Ruiz 2006; Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008; von Stutterheim 2003). Keywords: Motion events; event construal; endpoint encoding; satellite-framed languages; verb-framed languages; Path; Manner; Spanish; Swedish