Comprehending and Speaking About Motion in L2 Spanish A Case of Implicit Learning in Anglophones 1st Edition Samuel A. Navarro Ortega

Comprehending and Speaking about
Motion in L2 Spanish A Case of Implicit

Learning in Anglophones 1st Edition
Samuel A. Navarro Ortega
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COMPREHENDING
AND SPEAKING
ABOUT MOTION
IN L2 SPANISH A Case of
Implicit Learning
in Anglophones

Comprehending and Speaking about
Motion in L2 Spanish
Comprehending and
Speaking about
Motion in L2 Spanish
A Case of Implicit Learning in Anglophones
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-49306-0â•…â•…â•…â•…ISBN 978-3-319-49307-7â•…(eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49307-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960707
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover design by: Fatima Jamadar
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my son and Loreto.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank:

Students from the Spanish programme at the University of Alberta
who volunteered their participation in this study;
Volunteer undergraduates from Universidad de Santiago in Chile and
Laurentian University in Canada, whose insightful view of their first lan-
guage refined the data coding system;
Professor John Newman and Professor Elena Nicoladis for their invalu-
able input and feedback on various aspects of this study;
Professor Ralph Sarkonak and The Department of French, Hispanic &
Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia for supporting the
preparation of this manuscript by hiring a research assistant;
Jennifer A. Nagtegaal, my research assistant, for her excellent collabo-
ration during the preparation of this manuscript;
Anneliese Schultz, my editor, for her thorough stylistic reviews and
comments to previous versions of the manuscript;
The two anonymous reviewers and colleagues whose input helped
refine my ideas and my interpretation of the findings.
vii
Contents
1)>>Introduction)>>1
1.1)>> The Purpose of This Book)>> 1
1.2)>> Spanish in the Second-Language Classroom)>> 4
1.3)>> Explicit and Implicit Knowledge in L2
Spanish Language Learning)>> 9
1.4)>> Being Unaware of Learning L2 Spanish)>> 12
1.5)>> About This Book)>> 15
References)>>21
2)>> The Linguistic Expression of Motion in Language)>>27

2.1)>> Motion: An Example of a Universal Concept)>> 27
2.2)>> The Internal Structure of the Concept of Motion)>> 30
2.3)>> Talmy’s Typological Framework)>> 32
2.4)>> Anglophones’ Preference in Talking
About Motion Events)>> 34
2.5)>> Hispanophones’ Preference in Talking
About Motion Events)>> 37
2.6)>> Manner of Motion: Do Hispanic
Speakers Ever Talk About It?)>> 39
2.7)>> Some Constraints on the Use of Manner
in the Spanish Discourse)>> 42
ix
xâ•…â•…Contents
2.8)>> Motion Conflation: Central Tendencies Rather

Than Crosslinguistic Differences)>> 44
2.9)>> How the Meaning of Motion Surfaces
on Meaning-Form Mappings)>> 47
References)>>49
3)>> Motion-Event Descriptions a Recurrent

Topic in Spanish Discourse)>>55
3.1)>> Conversations About Motion Events
in L2 Spanish Language Learning)>> 55
3.2)>> Teachability and Learnability of the Spanish
Motion Meaning-Form Mappings)>> 58
3.3)>> Empirical Evidence in the Domain of Motion
in Second/Foreign Language)>> 61
References)>>65
4)>> Motion Events in the Speech + Gesture Interface)>>71

4.1)>> Gestures in Speech)>> 71
4.2)>> Types of Gestures)>> 72
4.3)>> Child Speech + Gesture)>> 73
4.4)>> Gestures in the L2 Language Classroom)>> 74
4.5)>> Gestures: Are They Teachable Content?)>> 75
4.6)>> Gestures in the Domain of Motion)>> 78
4.7)>> Mixed Evidence of Acquisition of the L2
Speech + Gesture Interface)>> 82
References)>>86
5)>> Investigating Learner Sensitivity to the Path

Conflation in L2 Spanish)>>91
5.1)>> Design of the Study)>> 91
5.2)>> Three Groups of Adult Anglophone Learners
of L2 Spanish)>> 92
5.3)>> An Implicit Learning of the Meaning-Â�Form
Mappings of Motion in L2 Spanish)>> 95
5.4)>> Dynamic Visual Stimuli for Comprehending
and Speaking About Motion)>> 96
â•…Contentsâ•…
â•…â•… xi
5.5)>> A Comparison of Motion-Event Descriptions

in First and Second Language)>> 97
References)>>97
6)>> Sensitivity to the Path Conflation in Written L2 Spanish)>>101

6.1)>> Comprehension Precedes Production
of L2 Vocabulary)>> 101
6.2)>> Receptive Task for Investigating the Path
Conflation in Written L2 Spanish)>> 103
6.3)>> Procedure for Investigating the Path Conflation
in Written L2 Spanish)>> 106
6.4)>> Expected Outcomes of Investigating
the Path Conflation in Written L2 Spanish)>> 107
6.5)>> Findings of Investigating the Path Conflation
in Written L2 Spanish)>> 109
6.6)>> What Findings Tell Us About the Path
Conflation in Written L2 Spanish)>> 113
References)>>126
7)>> Sensitivity to the Path Conflation in Oral L2 Spanish)>>131

7.1)>> Experimental Context for the Oral Production Task)>> 131
7.2)>> The Structure of the Oral Production Task)>> 133
7.3)>> Procedure for Investigating the Path Conflation
in Oral L2 Spanish)>> 135
7.4)>> Expected Outcomes of Investigating the Path
Conflation in Oral L2 Spanish)>> 138
7.5)>> Findings of Investigating the Path Conflation
7.6)>> Comparative Analysis of Path Types and Tokens
in L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish)>> 146
7.7)>> Highest Token Frequencies of Path and Manner
in L1 Spanish and L2 Spanish)>> 151
7.8)>> What Findings Tell Us About the Path Conflation
7.9)>> Extracting Central Path Verb Tendencies
from the L2 Spanish Input)>> 174
xiiâ•…â•…Contents
7.10)>> Manner Postverbal Modifiers)>> 177

References)>>178
8)>>Conclusion)>>187
8.1)>> Accumulated L2 Knowledge a Predictor
of Implicit L2 Learning)>> 187
8.2)>> Summary of Evidence from Receptive
and Productive Use of L2 Spanish Motion)>> 188
8.3)>> Some Implications from The Evidence of Reception
and Production of Motion in L2 Spanish)>> 189
8.4)>> Time on Task a Predictor for Learner Progress
in the Domain of Motion in L2 Spanish)>> 192
8.5)>> L2 Spanish Data Under Two Methods of Analysis)>> 195
8.6)>> Limitations of the Study)>> 196
8.7)>> Prospects for Further Study)>> 198
References)>>200
Appendix A)>>205
Appendix B)>>207
Appendix C)>>209
Appendix D)>>211
Appendix E)>>213
Appendix F)>>215
Appendix G)>>219
Index)>>221
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1)>> Figure in motion to reach a goalç’•å±¢ 7

Fig. 6.1)>> Comparison of the percentages of sentences with the
meaning of path mapped onto a verb root selected
by the three groups of Anglophone learners of
Spanish in both conditions of the forced-choice
meaning-Â�judgement survey)>> 110
Fig. 7.3)>> Corpus-based analysis: percentages of path types in
the oral narratives across the three L2 Spanish and L1
English databases)>> 141
Fig. 7.1)>> Language-group analysis: percentages of path types
in the oral narratives across the three groups of L2
Spanish and L1 English)>> 142
Fig. 7.2)>> Language-group analysis: percentages of path tokens
in the oral narratives across the three groups of L2
Spanish and L1 English)>> 143
Fig. 7.4)>> Corpus-based analysis: percentages of path tokens in
English databases)>> 145
Fig. 7.5)>> Corpus-based analysis: percentages of path and manner
verb types in the oral narratives across the three L2
Spanish and L1 Spanish databases)>> 148
xiii
xivâ•… List of Figures
Fig. 7.6)>> Corpus-based analysis: percentages of path tokens in

Spanish databases)>> 149
Fig. 7.7)>> Graphic representation of trajectories performed by the
figures in the wordless cartoon movie, as linguistically
encoded through the L2 Spanish path token
sequence ir ‘go’—regresar ‘come back’
at the levels 100 and 200)>> 171
Fig. 7.8)>> Graphic representation of trajectories performed
by the figures in the wordless cartoon movie. as
linguistically encoded through the path token
sequence salir ‘exit’—ir ‘go’—regresar ‘come back’
in the advanced learners and the control group)>> 173
List of Tables
Table 6.1ç’€ Dynamic motion-event stimulus)>> 103

Table 7.1ç’€ Sample of L1 Spanish corpus)>> 138
Table 7.2ç’€È•Sample of L1 Spanish path verbs with highest
token frequencies)>> 151
Table 7.3ç’€È•Sample of L1 Spanish manner verbs with highest
Table 7.4ç’€È•Sample of L2 Spanish path verbs with highest token
frequencies at level 100)>> 153
token frequencies at level 100)>> 153
Table 7.6ç’€È•Sample of L2 Spanish path verbs with highest token
frequencies at level 200)>> 154
Table 7.7ç’€È•Sample of L2 Spanish manner verbs with
highest token frequencies at level 200)>> 154
Table 7.8ç’€È•Sample of L2 Spanish path verbs with highest
Table 7.10ç’€È•The three path types with highest token frequencies in L2
Spanish and L1 Spanish oral narratives)>> 156
Table 7.11ç’€È•Sample of L1 English path types with highest
Table 7.12ç’€È•Frequency of manner expressions with path and
manner verb tokens in L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish
oral narratives)>> 159
xv
1
Introduction
1.1)>> The Purpose of This Book

This book reports on an investigation into the learning of motion-event
descriptions among adult Anglophone learners of Spanish as a foreign
language (L2 Spanish by convention) at three levels of proficiency:
beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The book will motivate language
instructors to entertain a broader perspective on the teaching and learn-
ing of Spanish, since motion conflation does not show among the typical
teachable contents of traditional Spanish programmes. Evidence suggests
that the learning analysed in this book is usually a case of implicit learn-
ing rather than explicit teacher instruction.
The relevance of this study lies in the fact that motion is a univer-
sal concept inextricably associated with human kinaesthetic experience
(Cadierno, 2004), yet we talk in language-specific ways about how ani-
mate or inanimate entities change location (Talmy, 1985, 2000). Thus,
for Anglophone speakers to sound idiomatically accurate in L2 Spanish,
they need to learn the lexico-syntactic constructions with which the
target-Â�language community naturally talks about motion.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

S.A. Navarro Ortega, Comprehending and Speaking about Motion
in L2 Spanish, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49307-7_1
2â•… Comprehending and Speaking about Motion in L2 Spanish
Drawing on Leonard Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classifica-

tion, researchers have described the ways languages from different families
lexicalize motion and co-event (manner or cause), motion and path, and
motion and figure. English and Spanish have been the source of numer-
ous studies as they purportedly belong to two different typologies. English
belongs to the group of so-called satellite-framed languages (S-languages)
and Spanish is one of the verb-framed languages (V-languages). Evidence
suggests that even though the two languages overlap in some lexicaliza-
tion patterns, their main trends differ. Briefly, when speakers talk about
translational motion events (i.e., events that involve an entity changing
location from Point 1 to Point 2), Anglophones and Hispanophones tend
to describe a different aspect of that event.
According to the typological classification, there is a high probability
that Anglophone speakers will describe an event that involves a human
entity in displacement in terms such as A man ran out of the building.
Conversely, to refer to that same motion event, Hispanophones will most
likely say El hombre salió del edificio ‘the man went out of the building.’ At
first sight, these two statements convey roughly the same idea: the entity
(the man) is no longer in the building (the source point). Some might
even argue that the statements function as possible translations of each
other. Yet closer inspection reveals that the statements do indeed differ in
terms of what they communicate. The source of this subtle but substan-
tive semantic difference lies in the type of verb root.
In the case of the English statement, speakers prefer manner verbs (e.g.,
run, crawl, grab), which emphasize the internal mechanics of motion,
the rate of motion, and even the attitude of the entity involved in the
motion event (Slobin, 1997, 2000). Hispanophones prefer instead to
talk about things that move in the world by lexicalizing the path in the
main verb (e.g., ir ‘go’, salir ‘go out’, subir ‘ascend’). This means that
speakers’ descriptions focus on the trajectory followed by an entity with
respect to the source (e.g., del edificio ‘of the building’), the medium, and
the goal that the entity aims to reach (Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006; Talmy,
1985, 2000). If the discourse context requires that Hispanophones add
information about the manner in which the motion takes place, they
prefer to convey it in postverbal constructions (e.g., el hombre salió cor-
riendo ‘the man went out running’) that may be elided due to discourse
1â•…Introductionâ•…
â•…â•… 3
factors (see Chap. 2 for a detailed presentation of the S-language and

V-language typologies). Some scholars have accounted for these semantic
variations in terms of the training we receive from our first language that
predisposes us to think (i.e., perform mental processes) for communicat-
ing, either linguistically or by gesturing, in language-specific ways (Kita
& Özyürek, 2003; McNeill & Duncan, 2000; Pawley & Syder, 1983;
Slobin, 1996, 2000).
In order to test the assumption that crosslinguistic differences may
lead to the perception of different aspects of a motion event, researchers
have designed tasks in which speakers have been asked to look at a wide
range of dynamic and static animate and inanimate objects. Experimental
tasks have elicited participants’ oral and written motion-event descrip-
tions produced in non-narrative as well as narrative tasks. Most of these
studies have investigated the tendencies of reception and production of
motion events in monolingual speakers. Fewer studies have considered
bilinguals’ comprehension and production of motion events, especially
for L2 learners at three distinct proficiency levels and measured under
the same experimental conditions (for a detailed review of research on
Talmy’s typological classification, see Cadierno, 2008, pp. 247–266).
For the study reported in this book, all three groups of Spanish learn-
ers completed a forced-choice meaning-judgement task. This receptive
task tested learners’ sensitivity to the preferred motion conflation in writ-
ten Spanish. In addition, the learners orally narrated the stories of two
short, silent excerpts of a Pink Panther cartoon. This task was designed
to test how learners spoke about motion events within the context of the
two stories. Learners completed these tasks in both first-language (L1)
English and L2 Spanish, and linguistic tendencies were subsequently
compared with those of a native Spanish-speaking group. The ultimate
goal of the study was to determine when and how, over the course of
studying Spanish, the Anglophone speakers demonstrated comprehen-
sion and spontaneous production of the preferred motion-conflation pat-
tern of the Romance language.
Our current understanding of how Anglophone speakers progress from
first-language preference for the manner of motion to the Spanish prefer-
ence for the path of motion remains limited. Equally insufficient is our
understanding of the effect that learning to verbalize motion in a Â�second
language may have on the way bilingual speakers mentally represent the
concept, or the extent to which a new form of mental representation
indicates some kind of reconceptualization (Pavlenko, 2000). For this
reason, the study reported in this book sheds new light on a topic that
remains underresearched. Of particular interest for Spanish instructors is
the fact that the evidence collected came from students learning Spanish
in a traditional classroom environment. Therefore, learners’ exposure to
L2 Spanish input was by and large mediated by pedagogical motivations,
as I explain below.
1.2)>> Spanish in the Second-Language

Classroom
In Canada, the location of this study, a classroom is the primary context
for learning L2 Spanish. Access to authentic sources of Spanish input in
non-academic settings varies greatly depending on the size of the immi-
grant Hispanic community living in the area. Spanish language teachers
(and teachers of other languages as well) would agree about the posi-
tive effects of language instruction, at all levels of education (Doughty,
2003; Long, 1983, 1988). Furthermore, advances in technology and
communication have opened up the possibility for language learners to
complement the L2 input they receive from language teachers by read-
ing or listening as well as responding to or interacting with information
available in various electronic forms (Gonglewski, 1999; Logan, 2000;
Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2000; Warschauer, 1995).
Watching and listening to native Spanish speakers interacting with or
reading materials in the target language offer learners rich L2 input with
all sorts of idioms, expressions, and linguistic subtleties. This is the case
of learners participating in online one-on-one language exchanges (i.e.,
teletandem), who enjoy the atypical opportunity of dialoguing with native
speakers in real time (Navarro, 2013, Navarro & Contreras, Submitted;
Telles & Vasallos, 2006; Vasallos & Telles, 2006). These non-Â�guided
conversations appear to be more beneficial when learners have already
achieved some knowledge of the second language. This is because in non-
guided exposure to L2 input, learners may receive linguistic material
â•…â•… 5
for which they are not yet developmentally prepared (Krashen, 1985;
Pienemann, 1989); therefore, the input becomes incomprehensible and is
only perceived as “noise” (Krashen, 1982; Long, 1983, 1996).
By contrast, the Spanish language classroom can appear to be a safe
environment because exposure to the linguistic input is, for the most
part, assessed and monitored in order to ensure comprehension of the
new language’s grammatical properties (R. Ellis, 1981, p. 74). This has
led some to conclude that explicit learning, a conscious learning process
associated with direct teacher instruction, is more advantageous than the
unconscious learning process of implicit L2 learning (Doughty, 2003;
Norris & Ortega, 2000). Yet, as I will explain, implicit learning is an
inescapable reality of language instruction, and Spanish is no exception.
In the context of this book, L2 input should be understood as any
example of a non-native language, oral or written, that a learner receives
within or beyond an instructional environment where there is emphasis
to meaning and learners exercise comprehension (B. VanPatten, personal
communication, July 17, 2015). With respect to the concept of motion,
in subsequent chapters I discuss the fact that this is a recurrent notion in
the Spanish language classroom; therefore, learners should witness multi-
ple occurrences of the target-language input. For instance, many instruc-
tors adhere to teaching methods that involve students changing location
within the classroom to respond to a command (e.g., Asher’s [1969,
2000] Total Physical Response; Maxwell’s [2001] Accelerated Integrative
Method), while others have students move around as part of an activ-
ity (e.g., a game or role-play), and/or incorporate motion to explain the
meaning of actions, such as swimming, that have a strong physical com-
ponent (Duffelmeyer, 1980; Saltz & Donnenwerth-Nolan, 1981).
What is critical in all these situations that involve processing L2
Spanish input containing motion-event descriptions is that Anglophone
learners hear, speak, read, and write linguistic samples that contrast
with what they conventionally comprehend and produce in L1 English.
Earlier I mentioned that for speaking about their own movement or that
of another entity, Anglophone speakers prefer to talk in terms of the
walking, crawling, or gliding performed (i.e., the manner of motion). Yet,
in the L2 Spanish context, in the classroom or elsewhere, Anglophone
learners perceive that Hispanophones rarely use all such descriptive
Â�
manner verbs, and simply hear that an entity sube ‘goes up’ or baja ‘goes
down’ somewhere. That is, the speaker only attends to the fact that the
entity being described no longer remains at some original source point;
instead, the entity relocates to a new position by going in some direction.
Whether the change of location happens in the form of a walking, crawl-
ing, or another manner verb event, the Anglophone learner of Spanish
may refrain from verbalizing it because it is not conventionally required
in the L2 language.
This is, in fact, the foundation of a crosslinguistic difference between
English and Spanish, and a source of challenges in L2 language learn-
ing. Simply put, Anglophone learners are preconditioned by L1 English
to be more cognizant of features of their world such as motion events
that are explicitly and recurrently encoded in English-specific ways (i.e.,
the manner of motion). Thus, conditioning by the L1 may interfere
with the learning of subsequent languages (Littlemore, 2009). Notice
that the issue here is not that English lacks path verbs because it cer-
tainly has a vocabulary of verbs such as come, enter, leave, and many
others. The language simply favours manner conflation in spontaneous
discourse (Talmy, 1985, 1991, 2000). As a result, Anglophone learners
are likely less aware of the features that the additional language stresses
(Littlemore, 2009).
At this point the Spanish language instructor reading this book might
wonder whether the students in her class talk about motion events using
the correct Spanish lexicalization pattern. Moreover, the instructor may
be wondering about the frequency with which she has to correct her
students’ ill-formed motion constructions. As I will show later in the
book, the verbalization of the concept of motion does not lead to unin-
telligibility in L2 Spanish. Motion conflation does not trigger the same
semantic inaccuracy as does the use of false cognates that often lead L2
Spanish users into difficulties. A typical example is that of Anglophones
who use the word embarazada ‘pregnant’ when referring to someone who
actually felt embarrassed! Near convergence of the pronunciation of these
two words makes them ideal candidates for students to also assume the
existence of a semantic correspondence. But nothing of this sort could
happen when an Anglophone talks about motion events in L2 Spanish.
And this is actually good and bad for the learner.
â•…â•… 7
It is good if we consider that whether or not the learner construes her

message using path of motion (the preferred motion-conflation pattern
in Spanish), her sentence may still be comprehensible, all things being
equal. Let us imagine that during an activity, Anglophone learners have
to talk about a movie clip to practise oral Spanish. One of the characters
is a male figure who performs a series of motion events within the context
of the storyline. Figure 1.1 shows a scene in which a male figure appears
in transit towards a goal.
As well as anticipating differences in lexical and morphosyntactic accu-
racy and complexity, I can predict that Anglophone learners will also
Fig. 1.1â•… Figure in motion to reach a goal

vary in terms of the semantic information they want to communicate.

Consider the following examples.
)>>(1))>> El hombre va para su casa ‘the man goes to his home.’

)>>(2))>> El hombre camina para su casa ‘the man walks to his home.’
In line with what I have explained above, however much statement (2)
is semantically and syntactically well formed, it would seldom be uttered
in spontaneous native Spanish discourse. The sentence simply does not
conform to the central tendency of what Hispanophones say when talk-
ing about people or things moving in time and space. The sentence seems
instead a calque of an English motion-event description, with a manner
conflation verb as the main predicate.
But regardless of whether the learner produces sentence (1) or (2),
intelligibility is not affected in this case. Both sentences convey that the
man is in transition to reach his goal. Unlike the confusion between
the false cognates I pointed out above (or any other morphosyntactic
error, for that matter), the substitution of path or manner verbs can-
not be labelled “wrong”; it is simply unidiomatic. Using a manner verb
rather than a path verb when talking about motion events is just not
what Hispanophones naturally do. Hence, if a proficient Spanish speaker
heard statement (2), she would quickly perceive that the sentence sounds
somewhat odd. The speaker might not even be fully cognizant of the rea-
sons for her disapproval, but she would intuitively know that things are
not said that way in Spanish.
Several questions arise at this point. How can learners cultivate aware-
ness of this aspect of the target language to which their first language
has conditioned them to be less sensitive? And in the absence of explicit
teacher instruction, how do they end up learning to speak about motion
events in L2 Spanish? Is the input they receive in class from the instruc-
tor sufficient to acquire this subtle aspect of the target language? Do they
require additional language sources in order to accomplish this learning
task? If so, where can these resources be found?
I doubt that Spanish teachers would object to the idea that within
the classroom the primary source of input is the teacher. Likewise, we
would all agree that the way we talk to our students in the Spanish class
â•…â•… 9
is a pale reflection of how we interact in non-pedagogical situations.

The reason is simple: as teachers, we adjust our speech to assure intelligi-
bility when interacting with our students in class (R. Ellis, 1994a). The
outcome of this speech adjustment is the so-called teacher talk, more a
pedagogically adequate style for addressing students than it is an exam-
ple of authentic Spanish language (Chaudron, 1985, 1988; R. Ellis,
1994a; Parker & Chaudron, 1987; Wong-Fillmore, 1985).
Two additional sources of input are the teaching materials and inter-
action between the learners themselves. Suffice it to say that in an
instructional context, much like in child language, the learning pro-
cess also advances as students attempt to decode L2 input for meaning
before elaborating a response. Thus, it is indeed feasible that learners can
develop networks of knowledge from which an interlanguage develops in
their minds, and progress will be directly mediated by the amount and
consistency of the L2 Spanish input they receive.
From the demographic information collected in the study reported here,
a few participants mentioned some use of Spanish in non-Â�instructional
environments. Likewise, most advanced learners reported that they had
had exposure to the target language in native-speaking contexts. This sug-
gests that these learners could be aware of authentic Spanish phrasing
but might still be unable to apply this knowledge productively. Most
beginner and intermediate learners, in any case, overwhelmingly identi-
fied the classroom as the main source of contact with Spanish. In what
follows, I briefly focus attention on the relationship of explicit to implicit
learning as it unfolds in an instructional environment. I provide con-
crete examples that will help the reader appreciate the effect that the L2
Spanish input could have on the empirical evidence reported in Chaps.
6 and 7 of this book.
1.3)>> E
xplicit and Implicit Knowledge in L2
Spanish Language Learning
Traditionally, explicit and implicit knowledge are defined as the outcome
of two learning processes whose defining characteristics are the presence or
absence respectively of awareness at the time of receiving and processing
input (DeKeyser, 2003; R. Ellis, 1994a, 1994b; Krashen, 1994; Schmidt,

1994a, 1994b; Sharwood Smith, 1994; Williams, 1999). In this sense, the
two forms of knowledge are directly related to the nature of the associated
learning processes (Hulstijn, 2005). While explicit knowledge is acquired
when the learner appears to be conscious of being exposed to aspects of the
target language, implicit knowledge is acquired despite the learner being
presumably unconscious of the fact that she might be learning something
new (see comment on noticing below).
An instructor’s teaching approach plays a major role in terms of how
learners come into contact with the target language. For instance, Spanish
instructors whose pedagogical approach adheres to what Lightbown and
Spada (2015, p. 154) define as Get it right from the beginning treat the
language as an object of study (Krashen, 1982; Krashen & Seliger, 1976).
That is, they parse and label the language’s structures using metalinguis-
tic terminology (e.g., preterit, verb root). At the same time, they prefer
instructional materials that focus attention on the formal (i.e., morpho-
syntax) aspects of Spanish. As a result, learners gain various levels of pro-
ficiency to describe and apply formal properties of Spanish (e.g., verb
paradigms, use of clitics). Learners apply this explicit knowledge, about
which they can even formulate and test hypotheses, as they search for
structures (N. Ellis, 1994a, 1994b; R. Ellis, 1994b; Hulstijn, 2005).
This kind of awareness of what is known about the target language
becomes evident in the following protocol reported by Navarro (2015).
The reflection comes from an undergraduate student who facilitated
Spanish practice to a group of high school students. In response to the
question of whether he liked Spanish more after the community project
in which he participated, the undergraduate replied: Yes. Because I realize
how many words and grammar concepts I actually know pretty well and how
diverse the language is (#6, M, 22).
Two points need to be mentioned to put this statement into perspec-
tive. First, the undergraduate student and his peers were all learners of
Spanish at the time of the community project. Second, they all prepared
activities using the language content the high school students were study-
ing at that time. This means that the undergraduates needed to review that
content to plan suitable activities. This presents the possibility that the
undergraduate learners verified the extent to which they were Â�prepared
â•…â•… 11
to plan such activities. Therefore, what the protocol reflects is an intro-

spective analysis that learner #6, M, 22 performed on his own interlan-
guage, which most likely happened more than once over the course of the
project. The learner shows consciousness of having lexical and grammati-
cal L2 Spanish knowledge that he must have kept in analysed form; hence
he was able to quantify it and assess his own command of it.
Equally important, in the protocol the learner acknowledged that he
still had more to learn about the diversity of the Spanish language. The
latter is in line with R. Ellis’s (1995, p. 89) proposal that explicit L2
knowledge “helps learners notice linguistic properties of the input they
might otherwise not notice”. One possibility is that in preparing activi-
ties for his high school peers, student #6, M, 22 reviewed his knowledge
of the vocabulary required to talk about a familiar topic such as means of
transportation. While reviewing the Spanish equivalent for, say, the word
bus, the learner discerned that people call it micro in Chile, but camión in
México, and guagua in the Spanish Caribbean (Wigdorsky, 2005, p. 185).
Pertinent to such review and preparation is R. Ellis’s (1995) suggestion
that we, language users, might thus come to realize there are aspects of
the target language we are unaware of when manipulating known infor-
mation. Reviewing the names of means of transportation, for example,
could bring into our awareness the existence of synonyms that otherwise
would have remained unnoticed. In the case of the study reported in this
book, it is possible that explicit instruction on aspects of Spanish mor-
phology (e.g., verb paradigms, subject-verb morphological agreement)
could have an effect on what learners “discover” about semantic aspects
of the new language.
In particular, in order to speak about the motion event in Fig. 1.1,
learners might be primarily interested in coordinating the correct form
of the verb va ‘goes’ to the subject el hombre ‘the man’. They might still
notice that it is the verb ir ‘go’ rather than the more semantically descrip-
tive verb caminar ‘walk’ that they are coordinating. In other words, the
possibility remains that learners may also compare and contrast these ver-
bal forms for the amount and kind of semantic information they convey.
This study will show that experience using Spanish may play a substantial
role, and that advanced learners more than beginners appear to profit
from performing this kind of linguistic analysis.
What seems less common in the Spanish learning context outlined

above is that learners’ progress is assessed on content a teacher has not
purposefully included in the course syllabus. Clearly it seems simpler,
more transparent, and even fairer to measure progress in areas that we
are relatively certain our students have studied and practised. Not unrea-
sonably, we disregard material that has received either peripheral or no
instructional attention. Another reason for this is that it is difficult to
identify Spanish language content other than that traditionally included
in textbooks. The irony, though, is that the number of grammatical struc-
tures, verb tenses, and even vocabulary that our students learn in Spanish
appears insufficient relative to what they are able to do with the language
afterwards. It would be rare to find a non-native speaker who feels they
have acquired fluency in Spanish solely by relying on the contents learned
from textbook chapters. Indeed, who would claim mastery of Spanish
after having studied a textbook cover to cover?
The fact that our students appreciate being exposed to a native-Â�
speaking environment suggests that there is more to learn about Spanish
than an instructed environment can offer. Does every single form and
construction of a second language receive an explanation and a name? Or
are there aspects of a language that not even teachers are aware they are
using? In what follows, I briefly discuss implicit learning before introduc-
ing Leonard Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of the
concept of motion in Chap. 2.
1.4)>> Being Unaware of Learning L2 Spanish

In Sect. 1.1 above, I mentioned that the concept of motion is very fre-
quent in human communication because we embody it in our own expe-
rience of displacement in space and time (Cadierno, 2008, Talmy, 2000).
Yet we talk about it in our L2 Spanish class without necessarily conceiv-
ing of it as a specific subject of instruction. We can assume that learners
will process meaning-form mappings for the expression of motion with
less intentionality than they require to deduce rule formation (cf. verb
paradigms of regular present tense indicative). In the Second-Language
Acquisition (SLA) literature, the notion that most acquisition takes place
â•…â•… 13
implicitly or unintentionally has remained popular. It is assumed that

learning new information implicitly is characterized by the lack of aware-
ness manifested by the student during the process of learning. The idea is
that human beings are equipped with powerful mechanisms to learn by
means of extracting regularities from the environment (Williams, 2004).
In an early discussion, Stern (1983, p. 19) claimed that “much, and per-
haps even most, of such language learning goes on without any teaching,
and some of it outside the conscious awareness of the learner”. Implicit
learning is essentially an unconscious process, according to Seliger (1983,
p. 187), who claimed that “obviously, it is at the unconscious level that
language learning takes place”. In performing any task, there is the pos-
sibility that a person may learn something implicitly, simply by deriving
information from the world.
There is consensus, though, that learners require awareness of the
stimuli, as focused attention seems to be needed for coding new events
in memory (Robinson, 1995). Schmidt’s (1994a, 1994b, 2001) notion
of noticing is often cited as a precursor of implicit learning. The idea is
that a learner should be aware of a language form (e.g., an expression, a
phrase) among the many required to comprehend, say, a written passage.
The student will be unaware, however, of the underlying rules associated
with such a construction. The level of deliberate attention touches only
upon surface elements of an utterance in the L2 input. If, on the other
hand, the learner is aware of the rule governing the relationship between
a form and its meaning, her learning is no longer implicit.
For N. Ellis (2004, p. 60), implicit learning means the “acquisition of
knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus envi-
ronment by a process that takes place naturally, simply and without con-
scious operations”. This learning happens as the student unconsciously,
but not without attention to the target stimuli, draws intuitive conclu-
sions about the structure of form-meaning associations after processing
multiple examples of the same. Crucial to this induction process is the
frequency with which learners encounter a target construction in the L2
input in order to identify it as a characteristic feature of the L2 language
(N. Ellis, 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2008).
The notion of mass hypothesis assumes a major role in this case, because
learners process multiple examples of constructions over an extended
period of time. Consider, for example, the case of undergraduate Spanish

learners enrolled in an advanced 300-level course. In total, these learn-
ers have been exposed to the Spanish language for at least four complete
semesters. As a result, they gain more and richer experience with target-
language input, which naturally increases in complexity. It is possible then
to predict that, over time, these learners will likely process from teacher
talk or from other sources of Spanish input the regularities for interpret-
ing and speaking, among other things, motion events in natural discourse.
Above, I mentioned the case of learners who, while processing L2
Spanish input for establishing subject-verb coordination (a recurrent
topic of instruction), could perceive that Hispanic speakers use the path
verb ir ‘go’ in Spanish rather than a more descriptive manner verb such as
caminar ‘walk’. As expected in a language lecture, we teachers couch our
explanations in discourse that largely creates an intelligible context to stu-
dents. However, we retain marginal awareness of the discourse in which
the concepts we are teaching are packaged. Consequently, a Spanish lan-
guage instructor may not be aware of the reach of her in-class teaching.
As R. Ellis (1990, p. 94) rightly suggests, “learners may respond to
form-focused instruction […] and acquire features not envisaged by
the teacher”. DeKeyser (2003) notes that in experimental situations of
implicit learning, something similar happens. Participants usually learn
more information than the abstract surface features of the stimuli pre-
sented by the experimenter. Perhaps this can be attributed to the hidden
nature of implicit knowledge and the learning process that makes it avail-
able. In a classroom context, if no teacher intervention guides learners
to attend to specific aspects of the target language, the abstraction hap-
pens unconsciously as an unavoidable by-product of the way in which
events are encoded in memory while learners process L2 input (Biber,
Conrad, & Rappen, 1998; N. Ellis, 2004; McClelland & Rumelhart,
1985; Williams, 2004).
At this point I should clarify that my interest is not to elaborate on
the recurrent topic of whether or not language learning is more success-
ful with an explicit presentation of content (i.e., focused instruction)
than with an implicit one. Instead, I acknowledge the fact that students’
learning of Spanish in a classroom context is primarily determined by
what teachers teach rather than what they do not directly address in their
â•…â•… 15
Â�
lessons. Yet, if Stern is correct in claiming that there is no direct instruc-
tional intervention in “much, and perhaps even most, of such language
learning” (1983, p. 19), how can we be sure of this? Or rather, might it be
that we teachers do have the opportunity to identify levels of achievement
of Spanish language content that either was mentioned only peripherally
or that received no instructional treatment in class? The study reported
in this book addresses these questions and provides preliminary evidence
from learners with various levels of L2 Spanish mastery.
1.5)>> About This Book

The book is organized to provide theoretical information on the lexi-
calization of motion events, the contextualization of motion in Spanish
language instruction, and the investigation of the reception and produc-
tion of motion verb conflation in L2 Spanish vis-à-vis tendencies of com-
prehension and production of motion conflation in L1 English and L1
Spanish respectively. In the Introduction, the concept of motion-event
description is presented as a case of implicit learning by adult Anglophone
learners of L2 Spanish in a traditional language programme. The concept
of motion, despite its frequent appearance in the L2 Spanish classroom,
is not traditionally the focus of explicit presentation. Like other subtly
acquired patterns of speech, it is not integrated into the table of contents
of language textbooks.
Chapter 2 reviews the concept of motion in language as a recurrent topic
in human communication. Motion is important in our daily experience
(Langacker, 1987, 1991). The inherent meanings of verbs of motion reveal
a relationship between perception and language in that a speaker can physi-
cally experience their own movement or that of another entity while talk-
ing about it (Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976). Some theoretical positions
from cognitive semantics postulate that, across languages, speakers lexical-
ize motion using lexico-syntactic constructions that emphasize different
aspects of the event. In this sense, motion events are a fertile area in which to
explore the effect of crosslinguistic differences on how learners acquire and
produce form-meaning mappings to describe motion in a second language.
Of interest for this study are satellite-framed and verb-Â�framed languages as
they reflect the dominant pattern type in the two languages studied: English
and Spanish. Language-oriented approaches have focused attention on how
motion, a concept with a universal kinaesthetic basis (Cadierno & Lund,
2004), is reflected in the grammar of a language. Drawing on Talmy’s (1985,
1991, 2000) typological classification, English and Spanish have been the
source of numerous studies as they are said to represent different language
typologies. Findings in oral production indicate that, although the two
languages overlap in some lexicalization patterns, their main trends differ.
As noted in Sect. 1.1 above, English speakers tend to lexicalize the man-
ner in the main verb (e.g., run) in order to focus on the internal mecha-
nism of motion, whereas Spanish speakers tend to lexicalize the path (e.g.,
entrar ‘enter’), to focus on more general descriptions of motion. On the
assumption that crosslinguistic differences may indicate perception of dif-
ferent aspects of the same event, researchers have designed tasks in which
speakers have been asked to look at a wide range of animate and inanimate
objects and talk about the way they move in space. Few studies, however,
have considered the lexicalization of motion in written production and in
the receptive mode in both English and Spanish. Most research has focused
on the analysis of crosslinguistic differences of monolingual speakers; little
has considered proficient bilingual speakers. Talmy’s proposal also guides the
analysis of motion-event descriptions collected from the receptive and pro-
duction tasks the participants completed in the study reported in this book.
Chapter 3 contextualizes the description of motion events in Spanish lan-
guage instruction. The Spanish language classroom offers students ample
opportunities to watch, talk, and even write about motion events that
involve entities (animate or inanimate) changing location in space and time.
Notice, though, that the typological framework advanced by Talmy (1985,
1991, 2000) was not motivated by a language-teaching purpose. Similarly,
and as mentioned in the Introduction, the verb-Â�framed typology receives
minimal attention in the Spanish curriculum as evidenced by the infre-
quency with which this content appears in Spanish textbooks. Thus learners
depend primarily on the positive evidence processed from the Spanish lan-
guage input (e.g., teacher talk) to deduce the underlying rules for mapping
the meaning of motion in Spanish-specific ways. Interestingly, though, the
substitution of the path of motion for the manner of motion in Spanish
should, in principle, produce no miscommunication, as both conflation
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II.—THE FOLKLORE
In the Russian terminology, the people includes all the elements of
society that are not covered by the term intelligence. This latter is a
comprehensive designation of all the classes that have some
education and can give intelligent opinions on social, political and
cultural themes. The vast majority of the nation are the people in the
narrower sense, and it is essentially the characteristic of the
democratic nineteenth century to regard the intellectual life of this
people as worthy of consideration. This is true of the world at large,
but, in Russia, preoccupation with the people, down to the lowest
strata of society, has become a dominating note in literature.
Whatever other causes may have been active in creating this strong
sentiment,—and they will be discussed in a later chapter,—the
strongest impulse to such a people—worship was received from the
unexpected and undreamt-of wealth of that popular literature which
has been unearthed by the diligent labours of a few investigators.
In the eighteenth century, the term people had a wider
significance. All those who did not belong to polite society, that is, all
those who were not dignitaries or functionaries of a higher order,
were the people, and at first the literati were included in that general
appellation. Literature was entirely in the service of the higher
classes, whom it was intended to amuse and eulogise; there was no
other audience, and writers had to direct their attention to filling the
demand, as hirelings of princes, and as pamperers of the pseudo-
classic taste and Voltairism which held sway in refined society.
Though frequently originating from the people, these writers
dissevered all connection with it, for they had no longer any interests
in common. With a few occasional exceptions, the people had no
place in literature, and the inflated style that prevailed in prose and
poetry was so far removed from the language of the people that the
written literature could exert little influence upon the popular mind,
and if there existed anything of a traditional nature among the lower
classes, it was little, if at all, contaminated by literary influences.
Whatever it had received from bygone ages was transmitted to the
nineteenth century and collected just in time, before its certain
disintegration.
This disregard for the enormous majority of the people was an
inheritance of ancient Russia, before the reforms of Peter the Great.
We have already seen with what unintelligent severity the Church
persecuted every creation of a popular nature. As the nation
consisted of the Church and the people, so, also, everything that
was not directly of a Christian tendency was un-Christian and
therefore tabooed. True Christianity could never take possession of
the people that was not intelligent enough to discern what was
religion and what not, and the result was that “double faith” in which,
in spite of the persistent endeavours of the clergy, the old
heathenism showed through the varnish of the new faith. The
anathemas of the Church against “pagan rites,” which included the
singing of harmless songs, continue down to the eighteenth century.
In the general unprogressiveness of the whole country, the
agricultural classes, that constituted the bulk of the people, have
remained unchanged for centuries. Russia was as much a country of
raw products in the eighteenth century as in the twelfth, and barter
and tribute in kind were common until a very late time. The life of the
peasant has always moved in the same primitive conditions. Nothing
whatsoever has been added to his physical and intellectual
existence since the introduction of Christianity, and the latter itself
did not much affect his spiritual life. He has remained essentially the
same through the ages. The love of singing and story-telling that
characterises him to-day has, no doubt, been his characteristic for
centuries, and as the memory of the untutored man is much better
than that of the lettered, he has been able to transmit orally to our
own day the stock of his ancient songs and tales. The folklore of
Russia, more than that of any Western nation, bridges over the
chasm between the most distant antiquity and the present. It is an
inheritance of the past, the more precious because it has been
transmitted by an unsophisticated class, whereas in the West the
people has come to a great extent under the influence of the literary
caste.
When the folklore of Russia first became accessible to scholars,
the adherents of the mythological theory of the origin of popular tales
and songs, which had been enunciated by Grimm, set out at once to
expound the epic songs and fairy tales as purely mythical symbols of
a pre-Christian era. It was assumed that the songs and stories had
come down to us in an almost unchanged text from the most remote
antiquity, and that they were the representatives of a distinctly
Russian conception. In the meantime, Benfey and his followers have
pointed out that the fairy tales of Europe are traceable to their Indian
home, whence they have wandered to the most remote regions,
crossing and recrossing each other, and mingling in a variety of
ways. Even the casual song that bears every appearance of native
origin is frequently identical with similar songs in distant quarters; so,
for example, Professor Child has brought together a vast number of
similar motives from the whole world in his monumental work on the
English and Scotch Ballads. Under the stress of these discoveries,
the greater part of the mythological ballast had to be thrown
overboard, and Russian folklore was brought into direct relations
with the rest of the world.
It has been a rude disappointment to those who believed in an
autochthonous development of the bylínas, to discover that they are
often variations of similar accounts in foreign literatures; that, for
example, the story of Sadkó the Merchant has been found to be
identical with a French story; similarly, the ceremonial songs are not
all of native growth. The study of comparative literature is of recent
development, at least so far as Russian sources are concerned, and
only a small part of the material has been properly located; but this
much can even now be asserted,—that the folklore of Russia is
much more intimately connected with that of Europe and Asia than is
the written literature of the old period. Much of the apocryphal matter
came through the South Slavic countries; many stories and songs
must have wandered by way of Poland to White-Russia, and hence
farther into the interior. Anciently there could have been an
interchange of motives between Germany and Russia in the cities of
Nóvgorod and Pskov, which stood in commercial relations with the
towns of the Hansa, while earlier the Northern saga may have left
some traces during the domination of the Norse. But one of the
investigators, Stásov, and after him Potánin, have stoutly maintained
that most of the stories of the Russian epic cycle came with the
Tartars directly from Asia.
If we admit all possible borrowings from the West and the East,
Russian folklore is still of unique interest to the student of literature
on account of the evident traces of great antiquity which it has
preserved. The same cause that kept the written literature of Russia
at a low level and destroyed all appreciable chronology has been
active in the traditional literature, and has saved it from violent
transformations. It cannot be asserted that any one song has come
down to us in its original shape. The change of the spoken language
naturally affected the stories and songs, and many a word that has
become obsolete has been superseded, or preserved in an
unrecognisable form. Contemporary facts of history have been
introduced in the place of older ones, as when the heroes of the
cycle of Vladímir are made to fight the Tartars. Motives have become
mingled by superposition of related stories, or by accretion of foreign
material. But never has the people wilfully transformed, corrupted,
added or taken away. Though individuals continually produced new
songs and stories, yet they moved in narrowly prescribed traditional
limits, and the moment these passed to the people and became its
common possession, they suffered only the accidental changes just
spoken of. The task of separating later and adventitious elements
from the bulk of this literature has only begun, and when that is
accomplished, the past of Russia will be reproduced much more
clearly than that of other countries of Europe, because an achronous
period separates the last two centuries from the tenth.
Only one epic, the Word of Ígor’s Armament, has survived from
antiquity. That others existed, the bard assures us when he tells of
princes, for a period of a whole century, whom Boyán, an older
singer, had celebrated. This precious relic is not only interesting for
its intrinsic poetical merit, permitting us to guess the possibilities of
the Russian untutored mind before the introduction of the repressive
Byzantinism, but it serves as a guide in redating much of the oral
literature of the present day. In the bylínas, the ceremonial songs,
the fairy tales, we continually come upon passages that are
constructed in the same manner as in the Word, and the popular
poetry of to-day and the writings of the whole old period contain
many identical phrases and illustrations.
The epic songs, or bylínas, have been discovered in out-of-the-
way places in the swampy region of the Government of Olónetsk. It
has puzzled all the investigators to explain why the memory of
Vladímir and his heroes should have lived so long in these distant
regions when every recollection of them has entirely disappeared in
Kíev, the scene of all their deeds. Throughout these epic songs there
is evidence of their southern origin, yet nothing whatsoever is known
of them in the south of Russia. Various explanations have been
attempted, but the most wide-spread is that the Great-Russians of
the south had been exterminated by the Tartars, and that the few
who survived had taken refuge in the north, while the present
inhabitants of the south have come from the south-east and
represent a different tribe. There seems, however, to be a more
plausible explanation. Considering that the Word of Ígor’s Armament
has not survived except in writing, and that there are no old epics
living in the mouths of the people, except in inaccessible regions, it is
natural to assume that no longer poem, nor a cycle of poems, which
demanded a great amount of mental exertion and a special class of
singers, could outlive the persecution of the Church, and that only
where the people were separated from the rest of the world by
impassable swamps and forests, and where, therefore, the influence
of the Church was of necessity weakest, was it possible for the class
of traditional bards to maintain itself.
There is ample evidence that these epics were based on historical
events, and that they belong to the same category as the historical
songs, of which a number have been recorded from the seventeenth
century and later. The oldest are those that Richard James had
written down in 1619; they were composed by some popular bard
immediately after the incidents which they relate. Later historical
songs deal with Peter the Great, while the song collections contain
many others that range in time from Iván the Terrible to the
nineteenth century. The manner of all these is identical, and strongly
reminds us of the epic songs. From this it may be inferred that the
bylínas were separate songs, composed by contemporary bards,
and that their present condition is merely due to that series of
corruptions to which all orally transmitted literature is subject.
In the Word, Germans, Venetians, Greeks and Moravians are
made to sing the glory of Svyatosláv. This is certainly not a mere
adornment of speech, but rests on the actual fact of a lively
intercommunication between the East and the West before the
introduction of Christianity and in the first century following it. Thus,
the chief hero of the Vladímir cycle, Ilyá of Múrom, was known to
German song and the Northern saga, where he is often mentioned. It
has also been found that many of the heroes are real personages
whose names are recorded in chronicles. Yet, though Vladímir is
made the centre of the Kíev cycle, his heroes seem to range over
two or three centuries; from this we may conclude that poetical
activity continued for a long time, and that it is only a later tradition
that has grouped all the interesting events around the famous
Vladímir. Originally, there must have been a number of cities of
prominence around which separate epics centred, but in time they
were transferred to the three great cities, Kíev, Nóvgorod and
Moscow, where the national life had its fullest development.
In the ceremonial songs, antiquity is even better preserved than in
the epics, and quite naturally. The epics arose on special occasions,
were adapted to transitory historical incidents, and only the most
favourable conditions of seclusion could save them from entire
oblivion. Not so the ceremonial songs. These belonged to a heathen
religion, contained a mythological element, and were part and parcel
of the people’s belief and customs. The chief labour of the Church
consisted in battling against the survivals from heathenism; but all it
accomplished was to ensure an existence for the Christian tenets by
the side of the traditional customs. The pagan festivities were
merged in the corresponding holidays of the Church, but the old
games, rites and songs went on as before. In time, the meaning of
all the customs connected with the seasons, marriage, death, was
forgotten, but the simple ditties were easily remembered, though
frequently transferred to other occasions. Had there existed in the
Russian Middle Ages any incitement to the introduction of new
songs, the old ones would have been abandoned long ago; but city
life was weakly represented in the country, most of the towns hardly
differing from agricultural settlements, and the city song, which
always plays havoc with the country tunes, had little chance to
spread. City life is of quite recent growth in Russia, and industrialism,
which is only now developing under our very eyes, draws many
forces away from the plough; when these return to the village, they
bring with them the refrains of the modern opera, and degraded
street ballads. The same lowering of the popular poetry has been
caused in the nineteenth century by the soldiers who have come in
contact with the city. The result of this is the complete disappearance
of popular song from some districts, and its gradual dying out in
others. Should this tendency continue with any regularity, a new kind
of folksong will result, but in the meanwhile there is produced an
uninteresting chaos.
The freer form of the prose story and the fairy tale, which are
bound by neither verse nor tune, makes them more subject to
change than the ceremonial song. Whatever their original meaning
may have been, they have been preserved as mere stories to
amuse. Though they frequently deal with mythical beings who had
some special meaning, they have all an equal value, and one tale is
as good as another; consequently they easily combined with each
other, and new elements were continually added to them. The prose
story is, therefore, less local and even less national: it travels far and
wide, and may turn up in any corner of the globe. The Russian
peasant is a good story-teller, witty and dramatic; hence he has
added much local colouring to all the flotsam of fairyland, and the
folktales of Russia have a distinct flavour of their own, and are
relished even more than the popular tales of the West. The absence
of a book influence on these stories shows itself in simplicity of
narration and lack of moral; the latter is particularly the case in the
animal tales, which, contrary to the usual stories of the kind, contain
no explicit instruction.
In the nineteenth century, the popular element enters more and
more into the literary productions, but a proper beginning has hardly
been made in utilising the extremely rich store of Russian folklore.
When the Romantic spirit held sway over the West, Russia had not
yet collected its songs and popular stories, and a Zhukóvski had to
imitate Western models, in order to make Romanticism accessible.
Púshkin divined more correctly the value of the native stories, and
made excellent use of the tales of his nurse. Otherwise, only
sporadic use has been made of the folktale in literature. One of the
best literary rifacimentos is the collection of all the stories told about
the Fox, which Mozharóvski has brought together in one long,
connected series.
III.—THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The Court at Moscow had come into contact with foreign ideas
ever since the days of Iván the Terrible. The “German Suburb,” as
the foreign colony was called, was itself a piece of the West,
transplanted into the semi-barbarous capital, and foreigners of
necessity occupied various posts in the Government. Germans,
Greeks, and especially Englishmen were employed as ambassadors
and foreign agents, and in the seventeenth century it was not rare to
find Westerners as teachers of Russian youths. At the same time,
clergymen from Kíev carried ever more and more the Polish
scholasticism and rhetoric to the most orthodox city, and with it came
the weak reflection of Western culture. Alexis Mikháylovich became
fascinated by the theatre, and a German troupe and even English
comedians played before the Tsar; among these early plays was a
crude rifacimento of Marlowe’s Tamerlane. Sophia went one step
further, and had a Russian translation of Molière’s Médecin malgré
lui performed in her apartments. Even poetry of an European type
had made its appearance before Kantemír, though only in the
mediocre syllabic versification of a Karión Istómin and a Simeón
Pólotski. Yet the progress was very slow, and the historian of Peter’s
time, Tatíshchev, had figured out that at the rate at which it was
proceeding, it would take Russia seven generations, or more than
two hundred years, to be equal in civilisation to the rest of Europe.
Then Peter appeared. He found around him weak tendencies to
reform, but hardly any men to help him carry them out, and no
institutions of any kind on which to engraft the new knowledge he
had brought with him from Holland and Germany. There was no
native scientific literature whatsoever; there were no terms in which
to express the truths which he and his disciples had learned; there
was no established language even for educated people. Peter united
in his person the extreme of practical sense with the idealism of
youth; while bent on introducing mechanical sciences for the
advancement of his country, he at the same time carried on a
correspondence with the philosopher Leibniz, and favoured the
introduction of every branch of literature. With an indomitable will he
wanted to merge savage Russia into the liberal West, and he
frequently used savage means to attain his end.
Peter’s idea of conviviality consisted in getting drunk in a room
filled with tobacco smoke, as he had known it in the taverns of
Holland, and the whole aspect of literature of his period is that of a
crude democracy, such as he advocated in his own circle. In
whatever he or his followers wrote there is a tone of rough simplicity,
practical liberalism, and the ardour of manful youth. Everything that
could be useful to the State and nation received his equal attention.
He familiarised his people with the German and Dutch jurists, who
were translated under his care, and with text-books on the most
necessary sciences and arts; he corresponded with German, French
and English scholars on the subject of establishing universities and
academies; he invited actors from Slavic Austria to play in his
theatre; and superintended the translation of Ovid, of encyclopedias,
and of romances. In this burning activity there could be no such a
thing as a literary school; everything was welcome, provided it
advanced his cherished reforms.
There was no time to waste on the mere externals of language.
The authors of the day had to grope their way as best they could.
Some interlarded their style with hybrid words from all the tongues of
Europe; others wavered between a purely Slavic and a more or less
Russianised language, and Peter the Great, though he was fond of a
display of Dutch words, could use a very idiomatic style. While
Stefán Yavórski and Feofán Prokopóvich charmed their
congregations with elegant sermons in which Byzantine rhetoric and
Western eloquence had the fullest sway, Tatíshchev laboured to find
the proper expressions for the historical truths which he had well
learned in the West, and the peasant Pososhkóv dimly guessed the
economic problems that presented themselves to the country, vainly
trying to clothe them in an intelligible language.
Peter did not live to see the fruition of his endeavours in literature.
The time was too short to produce any good writers, and though
belles-lettres were encouraged, the whole attention of the best minds
was absorbed in the acquisition of the most-needed information.
Knowledge was the watchword of Peter’s time, and the desire for
knowledge was so great that even later Lomonósov and
Tredyakóvski thought no hardships too great, to gain the coveted
instruction. It is characteristic of the times, that these two poets in the
new style walked to Moscow to enter school, one from the extreme
north, the other from the extreme south. A mighty task fell to the lot
of the generation that had been born in the days of the great Tsar.
They had to transfer the whole European culture to Russian soil and
to discover a means of expressing it. Kantemír, whose education
was of an European type, chose the ready model of French verse in
which to write his satires, wrestling to say in Russian what he
thought out in French. Tredyakóvski discovered the proper
versification for his native tongue, but his diligence and good sense
did not make up for his barren poetical talent. Sumarókov, single-
handed, created the drama, while Lomonósov fostered the ode,
settled grammar and created Russian science.
The intermediate period between the death of Peter the Great and
the accession of Catherine II. was not one that would in itself have
encouraged people to take to literature, which was looked down
upon as the handmaid of the mighty, if the writers had not inherited
an insatiable love of knowledge. The rough and sincere manner of
the Tsar had given way to a flimsy imitation of the Court at Versailles.
With the introduction of Western civilisation, the Empresses Anna
and Elizabeth took over only the mere external appearance, the love
of pleasure, a luxury that was incompatible with their rude
surroundings. Literary men had no public to write for, except the
degraded courtiers who might flatter themselves that they were the
Mæcenases of that literature for which, in their hearts, they cared
very little. Odes by which one might gain a favour, solemn addresses
written to order, tragedies to be furnished by such and such a date,
epigrams of a flippant turn,—these were the verses that the courtiers
wanted, and they were furnished in sufficient quantity. Though
Lomonósov was more intimately acquainted with Günther than with
Boileau, yet he, like his contemporaries, found himself compelled to
favour the introduction of the French pseudo-classic style, which was
the only one that high society knew anything about. From chaos and
no literature at all, Russia was of necessity forced to cultivate the
unnatural imitation of what was supposed to be classic antiquity,
before it knew anything about that antiquity, and before it had tried
itself in simpler fields. The literature of that period was consequently
unreal, stilted, distant.
This pseudo-classicism continued to flourish to the end of the
century, though a new spirit had taken possession of men’s minds in
the reign of Catherine. This Empress had educated herself in the
school of the great philosophers who, in the second half of the
eighteenth century, were the dominating spirits in European
literature. She corresponded with Voltaire, had not only studied
Montesquieu, but embodied his Esprit des Lois in her famous
instruction for a new code of laws, invited d’Alembert to be her son’s
tutor,—in short, she was in sympathy with the humanitarian
movements of the encyclopedists. She planned reforms on a
magnificent scale,—though but few of them were executed, as her
theories were only academic and had little reference to existing
conditions. Though she planned, with the help of Diderot, a
complicated educational system, yet there were no more schools at
the end of her reign than at the beginning, and the freedom of the
press was curtailed much more in the second half of her rule than in
the first. So long as there were no disturbing elements at home, and
things went to her liking, she was pleased to favour the liberalism
which had spread over Europe, and had found its advocates at other
Courts. Her idealism was of a purely intellectual character, and her
humanitarian views as she had expressed them in her Instruction
were good and harmless so long as they remained on paper. The
moment she was disturbed in her philanthropy by the rebellion of
Pugachév at home, and when, later, she was still more startled by
the events of the French Revolution, which it became the fashion to
ascribe to the philosophy of Voltaire, she recanted her liberalism,
and tried to crush all intellectual progress that had grown strong in
the earlier part of her reign. The best authors were ruthlessly
persecuted: Radíshchev was banished to Siberia for his advocating
the very theories which she had propounded in her Instruction;
Nóvikov’s philanthropic activity was sufficient cause for his
imprisonment, and it was fortunate for Knyazhnín that he was dead
when his Vadím of Nóvgorod made its appearance.
Yet, Russian literature owes much to Catherine, who, at least in
the first part of her enlightened absolutism, encouraged a healthy
development of Letters, often through her own example. Her own
writings familiarised her people with the best thought of Europe, and
as before her Racine and Boileau, so now Voltaire, Beccaria,
Montesquieu, were upon the lips of all. Literature had begun in
imitations of foreign models, and hardly a trace of anything original is
to be found in the eighteenth century; but even a superficial
Voltairism was preferable to the more distant pseudo-classicism of
the preceding reigns, for, though most of its humanitarianism was
spurious and its culture skin-deep, it led a few more gifted individuals
to a clearer perception of actualities, to a fuller interest in that which
was immediate and around them, and, in the end, to true culture.
The most promising influence on Russian literature was the one
which Addison and the English satirical journals began to exert on
Catherine and on nearly all the writers of the day. The Spectator, the
Guardian, and the Tatler had found a host of imitators in continental
Europe, and satirical journals sprang up in astonishing abundance. It
is not likely that Catherine became acquainted with the English
originals. Her knowledge came rather through German and French
translations; and the many passages from these English journals
that found their way into Russia after the fifties were likewise
generally derived at second hand. In any case, Addison and the
satirical journals took deep root in Russian soil, and a long series of
similar productions, from 1769 to 1774, had a very salutary effect on
the drama and on those writings in which contemporary manners are
held up to the scorn and ridicule of the people. Catherine herself, the
founder of the first of these journals, had only the intention of
practising this kind of literature for purposes of good-natured banter,
and she was rather shocked when she discovered that her example
had given Nóvikov and his adherents a weapon for attacking all the
negative sides of contemporary civilisation. Without having wished it,
Catherine gave into the hands of the disaffected a means of
concentrating themselves around a name, a standard,—and public
opinion became a factor in literature.
Patronage of the mighty was as much a goal towards which
authors aimed in the days of Catherine as in the previous half-
century, and the Empress regarded it as her privilege and duty to
draw literary talent to the Court, by giving them government positions
and lavish gifts. Derzhávin, Fon-Vízin, Bogdanóvich, Kostróv, Petróv,
all were attracted to her as the central luminary. Felítsa was the
keynote of what Derzhávin purported to be a new departure in the
writing of odes, but it was in reality an old laudatory theme with an
application of fashionable liberalism, and Felítsa remained the
watchword of a generation of poets that gyrated around the throne.
At the same time, Catherine made a seeming appeal to public
opinion by her comedies and satires. If Nóvikov took her in earnest,
and responded to her invitation by making a stand against her
lukewarm satire by a systematic arraignment of vice in every form,
he soon found it necessary in his next literary venture, the Painter, to
appease her suspicion and anger by a fulsome praise of the
Empress. Underneath this outward dependence upon the Court’s
opinion, literary coteries were, however, beginning to come into
existence, and the dramas of the day received their impulse from
their writings, and in their turn were beginning to look to others than
the Court for their approval.
These coteries were concentrated around the Masonic lodges,
where, under the pledge of secrecy, an exchange of ideas could take
place, and which, consequently, Catherine hated more and more.
This Freemasonry was in itself under English influence, whence
were taken the ceremonial and the organisation. It is said that
Freemasonry first made its appearance in Russia under Peter the
Great; later it came also under German influence, had its wide-
spread connections in Europe, and, under the guise of mysterious
practices, discussed the means of spreading popular education,
doing unstinted charity, and ensuring freedom of thought. In the
uncertain and superficial state of culture which then prevailed in
Russia, much that these men did was unreal and irrelevant: they lost
themselves in the mystical speculations of the Martinists and the
Rosicrucians, and wasted their time in an unprofitable symbolism.
But it is sufficient to read the biography of a Nóvikov to perceive that
their efforts for the advancement of science and useful knowledge
were more real than those of the cultivated and more materialistic
Catherine. If Catherine had made the press free, she also
persecuted those who had availed themselves of the privilege
against her pleasure; if her mouth spoke fine sentiments, her heart
was closed against their realisation. But Nóvikov, in the silence of his
mysticism, made Russia’s past accessible to the scholar, founded
the book trade, and took a practical interest in the common people
by giving them useful books to read. This Nóvikov, and the
unfortunate Radíshchev, whose book is even now prohibited in
Russia, and Shcherbátov, who preferred the rough old times to the
flighty manners of the day,—that is, the writers who were at outs with
existing conditions,—were the carriers of a new spirit which, though
not characteristically Russian, was akin to it in that it devoted itself
with ardour to the treatment of burning questions from a native
standpoint. Two of these writers, Shcherbátov and Nóvikov, were
Slavophiles in the best sense of the word.
We shall now make the balance-sheet of the eighteenth-century
literature in the separate departments, and see what residuum it
bequeathed to the nineteenth century.
In the scholastic style of the Middle Ages it became a settled
practice to dedicate books to powerful persons, and to address them
with eulogies on all solemn occasions. Polish influence had made
this kind of poetry popular at Kíev, and Simeón Pólotski introduced it
in Moscow in time to sing the glory of the new-born Peter.
Lomonósov’s activity began with an ode, and Tredyakóvski,
Sumarókov, Petróv and a host of minor poets, if that name can be
applied to writers of soulless rhymed adulation, proceeded in the
beaten track of “ecstatic” poetry, until Dmítriev gave it the death-blow
by his What Others Say. The only positive value lay in the odes of
Lomonósov in which he described phenomena of nature, and those
of Derzhávin, who, following his example, made similar use of them
as, for example, in his Ode to the Deity. His Felítsa, which marked
the disintegration of the “ecstatic ode,” left its effect in the lighter
epistolary poetry of his contemporaries, like Kostróv, and may even
be traced in the playful productions of the next generation.
The epic is akin to the ode, in that it is a kind of rapturous eulogy
on some momentous event in history. In the mad intoxication with
foreign pseudo-classic ideals there could be no place for a proper
understanding of native history; hence the flatulent epics of
Kheráskov, admired though they were, could be of no lasting merit.
The other epics dealt with foreign subjects. Tredyakóvski’s
Telemachiad could only amuse as a piece of poetical ineptitude, and
a pleasure-loving public of the times of Catherine II. was more
inclined to go into raptures over Apuleius’s Golden Ass which,
having passed through a French transformation, appeared as a
species of mock-heroic in Bogdanóvich’s Psyche. Púshkin still took
delight in it, and his earlier productions of this kind have something
of Bogdanóvich’s manner. Máykov’s Eliséy, which is really superior
to the Psyche, was not so well received because he introduced too
freely the popular element, for which at that time there could be no
appreciation.
Lyrics (in the narrower sense of poems expressing the individual
emotion of the writer) can have a place only where the conditions are
favourable to the formation of individual feelings, where well-defined
conceptions of nature and man are common to a certain class of
society or to the whole nation. Nothing of the kind could exist in
Russia throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, when
everything was only external veneer, and no lyrics made their
appearance until the last quarter, when, under the influence of a
thorough acquaintance with Horace and the French lyricists, some
fine verses were produced by Bogdanóvich, Kapníst, Derzhávin,
Dmítriev, Neledínski-Melétski. Most of these poems only appeared in
the nineteenth century, and all belong to that intermediate stage of
literature which was represented by Karamzín and Dmítriev and
which, in spirit, no longer continues the tradition of the days of
Catherine.
Krylóv’s fables are justly celebrated as among the best literature
that Russia evolved in the last century; but they are only the
culmination of a series of fables, most of them adaptations from La
Fontaine and Gellert, in which nearly all the poets tried their skill. By
1700, there had been current in Russia three translations of Esop’s
Fables, and Pólotski had imitated a number of such as he knew.
Here again we see the utter inability of the writers of the eighteenth
century to make use of a popular motive. Nothing is more common in
the oral literature of the people than fables, especially animal fables,
yet they had to borrow their themes from abroad. Sumarókov’s
fables make, with rare exceptions, unprofitable reading; Máykov
struck a few times a proper note, and Khémnitser alone, though he
followed Gellert closely, is still read with pleasure on account of the
simplicity of his tales. Dmítriev, as before, belongs to another period.
Modern Russian poetry practically begins with the satires of
Kantemír, and satires, with their adjunct, comedy, have remained
down to our day the most prominent part of belles-lettres; only,
whereas their usual purpose is to provoke laughter, in Russia tears
are their more appropriate due. Under the systematic, though
arbitrary and capricious, persecution of the censorship, writers have
evolved the art of telling a bitter truth by means of satire which by its
outward appearance generally escapes the scrutinising attention of
the usually dull censor, but the esoteric meaning of which is quite
comprehensible to the whole class of readers. In the days of Peter
the Great, with his violent reforms, direct command was more
effective than a satire which but few could unravel, and Kantemír’s
Satires, in spite of their literary value, are mere exotics. Catherine
thought this species of essays a good medium for a gentle reproof,
but Nóvikov more correctly divined their office, and much later Gógol
and Shchedrín brought them to great perfection along the path
indicated by him.
The same causes which prevented the formation of a Russian epic
and of lyric poetry throughout the greater part of the eighteenth
century militated against the evolution of a native tragedy. Theatrical
performances had been given ever since the days of Alexis, but
these were mainly Mysteries and Moralities that had long been
forgotten in the West, or crude plays and harlequinades by German,
Italian and English travelling comedians. Thus, a taste had been
formed for the drama when Sumarókov was ordered to organise the
first Russian theatre, though there did not exist the elements for a
native stage. Sumarókov furnished pseudo-classic tragedies as
readily as he manufactured any other kind of poetry, and his conceit
of being the Russian Racine indicates whence he took his models.
Neither Knyazhnín’s nor Ózerov’s borrowing of incidents from
Russian history could make their tragedies real: they were
accessible only to those who were steeped in French culture. Not so
comedy. Comedy stands in direct relation to satire, and it has taken
firm root in Russian soil. Catherine herself wrote a number of
dramatised satires, and Fon-Vízin’s Brigadier made its appearance
just as satire began to occupy an important place in the public eye.
Fon-Vízin, Griboyédov and Gógol are only the greatest of the long
series of dramatists, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
used comedy as a weapon for attacking the corruption of officials,
superficiality in education and the brutality of the serf-owners. Here
was an opportunity to introduce a native element, which becomes for
the first time prominent in Ablesímov’s comic opera.
Though Western novels reached Russia in indifferent translations
long before the end of Catherine’s reign, yet there was no proper soil
for them until Radíshchev came under the influence of the English
writers, especially of Sterne, and Karamzín, on the verge of the
century, introduced sentimentalism into literature. Throughout the
whole eighteenth century, little earnestness was shown in literary
pursuits. Prose suffered more than poetry, for prose demands a
more assiduous and constant attention than verse. It was left for the
nineteenth century to settle the prose diction appropriate to the
Russian language. In this neglect of cultivating an elegant prose
style is to be found the main reason for a very extensive literature of
memoirs which were not originally meant for publication, but were
intended as mere records for the use of posterity. The restriction of
free speech was another powerful factor in encouraging this species
of historical revelation. In these memoirs, the student of manners
and history and literature will find much better material for a correct
appreciation of the eighteenth century than in the exotic literature of
the upper classes. The emptiness of the superficial French culture,
which was prevalent in Russia, became apparent only to those who,
like Tatíshchev, Shcherbátov, and Nóvikov, busied themselves with
the study of native history. The progress which history made from
Tatíshchev to Karamzín is the most prominent feature in the
evolution of the native literature. By the historians was laid the real
foundation for a native science and interest in the people. It was
quite natural for these men to turn away from the disheartening
corruption of manners which was introduced from abroad, and to find
inspiration in their own past. They, consequently, were the first
Slavophiles, though as yet in the gentler sense of the word. They did
not preach a turning away from European culture, as did their later
spiritual descendants, but a more organic welding of the new life with
the Russian reality.
THE OLDEST PERIOD
Treaty with the Greeks (911)

Néstor’s Chronicle contains three treaties made with the
Greeks in the tenth century. It is evident, from the manner of
their composition, that the chronicler quoted some extant
documents which were probably translated by some
Bulgarian from the original Greek. These treaties are
interesting as being the earliest specimens of writing in
Russia and as having been composed before the introduction
of Christianity.
We of the Russian nation, Karly, Inegeld, Farlof, Veremud, Rulav,
Gudy, Ruald, Karn, Frelav, Ryuar, Aktevu, Truan, Lidulfost, Stemid,
who were sent by Olég, the Russian Grand Prince, and the illustrious
boyárs who are under his rule, to you, Leo and Alexander and
Constantine, the Greek Emperors and great autocrats by the grace
of God, to confirm and proclaim the amity which has existed for
many years between the Christians and Russians, by the will of our
princes and by the order of all those in Russia who are under his
rule. Our illustrious Prince has often thought, more persistently than
the others who have desired to maintain and proclaim the amity in
God which has been between Christians and Russia, that not only
with mere words, but also in writing and with a solemn oath made
over our armour, ought such amity be proclaimed and confirmed,
according to our faith and law. The following are the articles that we
wish to establish in the faith of God and in love:
In the first place, we will make an agreement with you Greeks to
love each other with our souls and as much as is in our power, and
we will not permit, as far as is in our power, that harm or damage be
done to any of you by those who are under the rule of our illustrious

Comprehending and Speaking About Motion in L2 Spanish A Case of Implicit Learning in Anglophones 1st Edition Samuel A. Navarro Ortega

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Comprehending and Speaking About Motion in L2 Spanish A Case of Implicit Learning in Anglophones 1st Edition Samuel A. Navarro Ortega

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Comprehending and Speaking about

Motion in L2 Spanish A Case of Implicit

Language Development and Disorders in Spanish speaking

Speaking in Public About Science A Quick Guide for the

Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages James A. Weisheipl

Speaking of Slavery Color Ethnicity and Human Bondage

Public Speaking for Criminal Justice Professionals: A

Systems Engineering Systems Thinking and Learning A

Public Speaking in a Diverse Society 5th Edition

Adjusting to a World in Motion: Trends in Global

Samuel A. Navarro Ortega

ISBN 978-3-319-49306-0â•…â•…â•…â•…ISBN 978-3-319-49307-7â•…(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960707

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover design by: Fatima Jamadar

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I would like to thank:

2)>> The Linguistic Expression of Motion in Language)>>27

2.8)>> Motion Conflation: Central Tendencies Rather

3)>> Motion-Event Descriptions a Recurrent

4)>> Motion Events in the Speech + Gesture Interface)>>71

5)>> Investigating Learner Sensitivity to the Path

5.5)>> A Comparison of Motion-Event Descriptions

6)>> Sensitivity to the Path Conflation in Written L2 Spanish)>>101

7)>> Sensitivity to the Path Conflation in Oral L2 Spanish)>>131

7.10)>> Manner Postverbal Modifiers)>> 177

Fig. 1.1)>> Figure in motion to reach a goalç’•å±¢ 7

Fig. 7.6)>> Corpus-based analysis: percentages of path tokens in

Table 6.1ç’€ Dynamic motion-event stimulus)>> 103

1.1)>> The Purpose of This Book

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Drawing on Leonard Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classifica-

factors (see Chap. 2 for a detailed presentation of the S-language and

1.2)>> Spanish in the Second-Language

It is good if we consider that whether or not the learner construes her

Fig. 1.1â•… Figure in motion to reach a goal

vary in terms of the semantic information they want to communicate.

)>>(1))>> El hombre va para su casa ‘the man goes to his home.’

is a pale reflection of how we interact in non-pedagogical situations.

input (DeKeyser, 2003; R. Ellis, 1994a, 1994b; Krashen, 1994; Schmidt,

to plan such activities. Therefore, what the protocol reflects is an intro-

What seems less common in the Spanish learning context outlined

1.4)>> Being Unaware of Learning L2 Spanish

implicitly or unintentionally has remained popular. It is assumed that

period of time. Consider, for example, the case of undergraduate Spanish

1.5)>> About This Book

Treaty with the Greeks (911)

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1.1)>> The Purpose of This Book

1.2)>> Spanish in the Second-Language

1.4)>> Being Unaware of Learning L2 Spanish

1.5)>> About This Book