Learning to Express Motion Events in Ewe

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is to examine Ewe speakers’ linguistic organization of motion events and how such language patterns develop in Ewe- speaking children. The work is situated within Talmy’s Theory of Lexicalization Patterns (which examines the conceptual structure of motion events as well as the typological patterns in which this conceptual structure is parceled out in languages), Slobin’s Thinking-for-Speaking Hypothesis (which explores how particular typological properties will lead Ewe children to learn a particular way of thinking-for-speaking) and the Cognitive and Language-Specific Hypotheses. The cognitive hypothesis claims that children come to the task of language learning with a pre-existent cognitive representation of the world. In contrast, the Language-specific hypothesis claims that the language learning process is often under the semantic structure of the input language and that such influence begins from the very beginnings of language acquisition. Elicited production tasks with fifty 3-, 4-, 5-, 7- and 9 year olds (10 participants in each age group) as well as a group of 10 adults were carried out using three elicitation tools developed for research into motion expression. Findings of the study support the claim that typological properties constrain how speakers of Ewe talk about motion from early acquisition phases to adulthood. At age three, Ewe-speaking children used more path verbs than manner verbs in the expression of motion events. From four years onwards, they used the typical SVC constructions, a combination of Manner and Path verbs, to express motion events. They also mentioned only one piece of information about ground of movement in individual clauses. The children neither showed any ability at describing the physical setting in which movement takes place (until 9 years of age) nor fully develop the narrative habit of describing complex motion events. Ewe-speaking children’s performance in motion event description has been found to grow gradually with increasing age and adult performance is always more extensive than that of children at any age. These results also suggest that while Ewe children follow equipollently-framed structural pattern when talking about motion events at a tender age of three, equipollently-framed discourse characteristics in Ewe-speaking children do not achieve maturity until adulthood. The thesis provides evidence for some possible early cognitive tendencies and the place of language specific hypothesis in language development. It also lends support to the typological categorization of Ewe within the Talmian and Slobin’s frameworks which can be used in other comparative studies in future research.