Foreign Language Teaching and Research ›› 2021, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (3): 400-412.

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Directions and domains of conceptual transfer: Evidence from motion events

ZHANG Sumin   

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang 050024, China
  • Online:2021-05-20 Published:2021-06-18

Abstract: Using Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis to distinguish concepts and conceptualization, this study investigates the directions and domains of conceptual transfer through 2005 bilingual construals, of the figure, path and background of motion events drawn from 31 short video clips of Chinese EFL learners. It was found that 1) there were systematic errors in the learners’ use of articles without significant frequency differences in their expressions of figure; 2) path satellites were significantly over used in the English expressions of path; and 3) there were much more source information expressions in Chinese than in English though the goal was expressed more than the source in both Chinese and English ground expressions. The results mirror predicted bidirectional transfer with different directions and domains in the motion domain: L1 transfer may occur more likely in lexical and grammatical domains whereas the target language’s reverse transfer may occur more likely in the syntactic domain. Finally, it traces the origin of the semantic elements construal of motion events, proposing that the conceptual transfer directions and domains are dynamic phenomena under the dual effects of the first and the target language conceptual features and thinking paradigms.

CLC Number: 

  • H319.3