Transferência conceitual na lexicalização de eventos de movimento em inglês-LE por falantes de português-LM

Abstract

This study investigated conceptual cross-linguistic influence (JARVIS, 1998; PAVLENKO, 2009) on motion event lexicalization (TALMY, 2000) in the speech of Brazilian bilinguals that have Portuguese as their mother tongue and English as a foreign language. This cross-sectional study combines qualitative and quantitative methods and has an exploratory, explanatory, and quasi-experimental nature. Data collection included four tasks: English oral descriptions of video clips, Portuguese oral descriptions of video clips, a placement test in English, and production and recognition of motion verbs in English. The sample included 105 adult participants in three groups: a control group of 30 native Portuguese speakers who did not know English, a control group of 30 native English speakers who did not know Portuguese and a target group of 45 bilinguals of these languages, subdivided according to their level of proficiency in English. The results show that the bilinguals suffered conceptual cross-linguistic influence of their mother tongue when describing motion events in their foreign language. This was verified by comparing the target and control groups in how they used lexicalization patterns typical of English and how they expressed manner of motion. Furthermore, the comparison between bilinguals with different levels of proficiency showed differences between them in the motion lexicalization patterns in English, which reflect a restructuring of the mental representations of the conceptual domain MOTION. The results also pointed to the occurrence of a hybrid lexicalization pattern in the production in English by participants of the target group, evincing conceptualizations that are a fundamentally bilingual. This research brings important contributions and innovations to the study of cross-linguistic influence, as it is one of the first on Portuguese-English conceptual transfer. It is also innovative for approaching the perceptual salience of manner of motion in Brazilian Portuguese from an experimental perspective. The method used showed to be efficient and can serve as a model for future studies on motion lexicalization, particularly in contexts with speakers of languages of different typologies. This study provides new insights into how language affects the way bilinguals describe motion, particularly into the cross-linguistic influence in the conceptual level – a phenomeon that needs to be further investigated in the context of foreign language teaching –, and it can lead to future research on other conceptual domains and languages.