Fostering foreign language learning with structural priming - illustrated with verbless directives.

German as a satellite-framed language (Talmy 2000) favors the expression of the motion path with so-called satellites. Therefore, it does not surprise that short verbless constructions consisting only of a directional prepositional phrase are common in German. With a collection of examples from comic strips in German, French and Italian (Hergé 1947, 1998, 1999; Jacobs 1980, 1991, 1993) the study first describes the semantic, pragmatic (illocutionary potential), syntactic and morpho-syntactic (German cases) constraints of such ‘verb-free’ examples (compare Jacobs (2008) and Wilder (2008)) in Goldberg’s (1995; 2006) Construction Grammar model. For French- and Italian-speaking learners of German, verbless directives constitute a challenge. Because Romance languages express the path of motion mainly with full verbs, learners tend to use a full verb also in German, which does not necessarily reflect the authentic expressions of motion. We propose a teaching methodology based on structural priming (Gries 2005; Loebell and Bock 2003). The efficiency of this methodology is tested with picture-depicting tasks designed for Italian master students of German as a foreign language (proficiency level B2+/C1)