This paper investigates the lexical choices made by speakers of Ladin in describing the opening scene of Mayer’s (1969) Frog, where are you? in Ladin and in the other languages they learnt later in life (Italian, German and English). The focus of the investigation is on motion lexicalisation, which varies across languages in terms of preferred encoding patterns (Talmy 1985, 2000; Wälchli 2001). Relative frequencies are calculated for the variants occurring in the different languages, before turning to a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, which forms the core of the analysis. The results are discussed with reference to the fields of typology and cross-linguistic research. The analysed texts bring to the fore the necessity of distinguishing between national and regional idioms and the potential value of drawing cross-linguistic issues to the explicit attention of learners. Possible implications are considered with reference to the novel framework of Applied Language Typology (Filipović 2018)
This paper analyses the choices of English learners describing the opening scene of Mayer's (1969) Frog, where are you? which depicts a frog escaping from a jar. A number of results were later tested using drawings that portray a person climbing. Speaking multiple languages might allow adjustment to ways of thinking, when formulating utterances and pointing to different details when describing pictures (Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis, Slobin 1996). The present paper contends that fewer contexts evoke mental images of climbing for speakers of Italian and Ladin who are learning English than for German-speaking English-learners, due to different cross-linguistic influences.
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