Boundedness, particles and motion events in L2 acquisition.

摘要

Boundedness is crucial to the linguistic encoding of events, and the current thesis examines this concept by asking "How do adult L2 learners of Hungarian acquire directional particles and motion verbs to distinguish spatially bounded vs. unbounded motion events?" Boundedness is illustrated by the following pair of sentences: John walked up the hill [bounded] vs. John was walking up the hill [unbounded]. In the first sentence the walking event is reported as having reached its spatial endpoint, thus it is a bounded description. In the second sentence no such information is supplied, thus, it is an unbounded description. This semantic difference is rendered in Hungarian through the presence and position of the spatial particle relative to the verb, as in: Janos felsetalt a hegyre [bounded] vs. Janos setalt fel a hegyre [unbounded]. In bounded interpretation the directional particle, i.e. fel 'up', must be present and strictly occupy the pre-verbal position. Otherwise, unbounded interpretation arises.;Formalist and functionalist approaches are combined here to analyze the acquisition of the morphology and syntax of directional particles Hungarian interlanguage. I propose that in Hungarian boundedness can be captured by assuming a single functional protection, i.e. 'BoundP'.;Knowledge of event boundedness was tested by triangulating data. Two production tasks (narrative retell, picture-based event encoding) and a novel audio-visual judgment task, administered on two continents, yielded a corpus of 35 learner narratives (containing 505 motion clauses), 791 L2 learner sentences and 3007 native speaker sentences, and 1022 L2 judgments and 5977 native speaker judgments. Findings suggest that the bounded-unbounded contrast is first encoded using simplex predicates of particles, verbs or the combination of the two vs. their reduplications. Later, most probably due to the expansion of the verb-repertoire, learners may acquire a grammar-based native-like contrast.