CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation
English prepositions play a key role not only in clarifying relationships between time and space but also in expressing of abstract notions carried by a verb. Different abstract meanings and functions of prepositions are derived from the interaction between our bodily experiences and spatial experiences (Langacker 1987, Brugman and Lakoff 1988, Lindstromberg 1996, 1997).
Some studies of spatial categorizations in second language acquisition lay great stress on prototypicality (Ijaz 1986) and others focus more on conceptual mappings, acquisition orders, facilitating factors affecting the acquisition of spatial relations (Becker and Carroll 1997).
Besides, many cross-linguistic studies have found that among different spatial relations, containment and contiguity/support are acquired first in the acquisition sequence (Johnston and Slobin 1979, Johnston 1985a, Sinha, Thorseng and Hayashi 1994). These studies show that English prepositions are difficult for EFL learners. In Taiwan, there have not been many studies focusing on L2 learners’ acquisition of English prepositions (Hsu 2006, Lin 2004, Lin 2009); however, some studies concerning English writing have stated that English prepositional phrases are among the major misuses to account for learner errors (Chen 2002, Tang 2004, Tseng 2002). In spite of various meanings of prepositions, as Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) pointed out, in order to help students learn more abstract senses of prepositions, familiarizing them with the spatial relations is the first step, since one preposition may generate distinct spatial relationships, as illustrated below.
(1) The man is in the house.
(2) There is a picture on the wall.
(3) They both live on this street.
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(4) Two police officers are standing at the corner.
(5) The boy throws the mud at the wall.
(6) Mom likes shopping at the supermarket.
Sentence (1) shows that the preposition in only has a spatial meaning (i.e., enclosure) while the preposition on as in (2) and (3) has two spatial meanings (i.e., contact, along) and the preposition at as in (4-6) denotes three different spatial meanings (i.e., point, target, and general area). It is likely that these different senses may increase complication for EFL learners when they identify spatial information of on and at. Furthermore, the learning difficulty will also increase when these prepositions are extended to metaphorical contexts.
As shown in the following examples, other than the spatial sense, the preposition in can be used to demonstrate the temporal sense in (7) and much more abstract senses in (8) and (9).
(7) There are two semesters in a school year.
(8) Vacuum cleaners are in common use.
(9) She spoke more in disappointment than in anger.
In addition, the difficulties of learning English prepositions with different usages have been pointed out by some previous studies (Khampang 1974, Rastall 1994). The most common difficulty L2 learners confronted with is the loose correspondence between L1 and L2 in their spatial uses of prepositions. The difference between L1 and L2 can be explicated by the one-to-many correspondence in which zai in Chinese corresponds to in, on, or at in English. As (10)-(12) show, zai in Chinese is corresponding to on, in, and at in English.
(10) a. Ta zhu zai Zhongzheng lu (shang).
3SG live at Zhongzheng road (on) b. He/She lives on Zhongzheng Road.
(11) a. Ta zai jiaotang (li) daogao.
3SG at church (in) pray b. He/She is praying in the church.
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(12) a. Ta zai juhui shang yudao yi wei gaozhong tongxue.
3SG at party on meet a CL senior high school classmate b. He/She met one of his/her senior high school classmates at the party.
In addition, as (10)-(12) show, Chinese spatial expressions are presented in the structure of
‘Figure + zai + Ground + (postposition)’. Whereas English prepositional expressions normally involve a locative prepositional phrase with whatever the phrase modifies (e.g., nouns, clause), there are three simple types of English locative expressions pointed out by Herskovits (1986: 7) which are shown in (13)-(15).
(13) The spider on the wall.
(14) The spider is on the wall.
(15) There is a spider on the wall.
They come in the structure of ‘Figure + Preposition + Ground’ in which they can be structured by one preposition with two noun phrases as in (13), or around a copulative verb as in (14), or even with an existential quantifier as in (15). Therefore, the specific spatial relation in English prepositional phrases is usually neglected due to the cross-linguistic differences between the two languages. Also, L2 learners, even with a high level of proficiency, are often confused with wide varieties of meanings and functions of English prepositions (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-freeman 1999). However, few studies provide insights into their conceptual mapping process in Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of prepositions.
Task effects have been often discussed in the acquisition research (Larsen-Freeman 1976, Tarone 1985) and the relation between comprehension and production has also been a hot issue to be concerned. It is commonly assumed that comprehension precedes production (McCarthy 1954) and that different task demands would yield different performance scores (Munnich, Flynn and Martohardjono 1994). There are some studies concerning spatial representation examined with rotation tasks (Levinson 2001, 2003, Li and Gleitman 2002), naming and spatial memory tasks (Munnich et al. 2001). Munnich, Landau and Dosher (2001)
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further claimed that the contextual information provided in their task significantly influenced performance on memory tasks. Moreover, some psycholinguistic researches have mentioned the strong effect of context to the processing of metaphoric language (Gibbs 1984, Keysar 1989).
Therefore, the present study aims to conduct an experiment to examine Chinese-speaking students’ acquisition of English spatial prepositions. Possible influential factors, L1 transfer, cognitive universal, and L2 proficiency will be taken into consideration to see if these factors affect the performance of Chinese-speaking subjects on different types of prepositions. Both comprehension and production tasks will be employed and the results of the two tasks will be compared to see if subjects perform differently.