Quadrilingual children express voluntary motion events : A case study

This case study explored how two quadrilingual siblings (8-9 years old)—born and raised in Sweden, exposed to variable input and with various proficiency levels in four typologically different languages (English, French, Russian and Swedish)—expressed the meanings of manner and path in voluntary motion and which linguistic forms they used to express these meanings. The theoretical framework is Talmy’s (2000a, 2000b) typological framework and Construction Grammar. Data was elicited using 26 video clips consisting of animations depicting voluntary motion events (Hickmann et al., 2008). Results showed that the children favoured manner verbs and path satellites in the satellite-languages (English, Russian and Swedish). In French, a verb-framed language, they did not prefer the expected path verbs and peripheral manner markings as predicted by Talmy’s typological framework. The findings suggested that the larger exposure to and the higher proficiency in the two s-languages Russian and Swedish may result in negative transfer of productive constructions for s-framing to the v-language French. Both typological characteristics and level of language proficiency may be of importance when multilingual children learn how to express voluntary motion events.Book DOI: 10.15626/asla2022.29