Adult and early acquisition of placement events in Spanish
doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.53.1.8
Keywords:
placement events; Spanish; categorization; encoding; acquisition; L1; L2Abstract
This article investigates the encoding and categorisation of placement events by preschool and adult speakers of L1 Spanish as well as Danish learners of L2 Spanish. Placement events are situations where some type of agent causes an object to move to a specific location. Previous research has shown that, despite being everyday and ubiquitous situations that are encoded in any language in the world, the speakers of these languages differ in the categorisation of these events; that is, they pay attention to different semantic aspects when describing this type of situation (Kopecka and Narasimhan, 2012). In Spanish, placement events are organised around three semantic components: Intentionality (caerse ‘to fall’, dejar ‘to leave on a place’), Force Dynamics (tirar ‘to throw’) and the topological configuration of the place of destination or Ground (meter ‘to put into’). This article shows that these conceptual patterns are prominent and prototypical in adult and preschool L1 Spanish speakers’ usage, but absent in L2 Spanish learners’ use. Data, elicited from the «PUT task» tool (Bowerman y otros 2004), come from 54 informants: 40 native speakers of Spanish (Aragon variety): 10 adults (ages 18-44) and 30 children (10 for each course of Preschool Education; ages 3;6 - 5;14) and 14 native speakers of Danish with Spanish as a second language.
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