Is he pushing the cart to the tiger cage or is he going to the tiger cage with the cart? The multimodal expression of caused motion events in French and Dutch as L1 and L2

Space is fundamental to human cognition and is part of our daily life. Although it is supposed to be a universal cognitive domain, crosslinguistic research has shown that there is a lot of diversity in the way it is expressed. Talmy (1985, 2000) distinguished between verb-framed languages (V-languages), i.e., languages in which path is encoded in the verb and manner in a satellite (e.g., Romance languages) and satellite-framed languages (S-languages), i.e., languages in which manner is encoded in the verb and path in a satellite (e.g., Germanic languages). These two types of languages also show similar patterns when it comes to the realization of caused motion events. In V-languages, there are two typical ways to express caused motion events: using a transitive verb as in (1) or a complex causative construction (faire ‘make’ + infinitive) as in (2) (Hendriks, Hickmann & Demagny 2008). In S-languages, the verb expresses cause and/or manner and path is expressed in satellites as in (3).
(1) Il a monté la balle dans sa chambre. [He took the ball up to his room]
(2) Il a fait rouler la balle le long du mur. [He rolled the ball along the wall]
(3) Zij schopte de bal in het doel. [She kicked the ball into the goal]
As we acquire our first language, we learn a specific way of thinking-for-speaking (TFS) (Slobin 1991). Our first language has an influence on how we describe the world both in speech and gesture (i.a., Kita & Özyürek 2003; Stam 2006; McNeill & Duncan 2000; Gullberg 2009; Negueruela et al. 2004; Kellerman & van Hoof 2003). When we learn a second language, we thus need to learn the multimodal TFS-pattern of our target language. The current study aims to (further) describe the multimodal TFS-pattern of French and Dutch by analyzing how they realize caused motion events and see how French-speaking learners of Dutch deal with these differences.
We conducted an elicitation experiment in which participants recounted scenes from a Tweety and Sylvester cartoon (1957) which contain 69 caused motion events. Fifteen L1 French speakers, twelve L1 Dutch speakers, and fifteen CLIL French-speaking learners of Dutch with a pre-intermediate level completed the task. The speech analysis consists of looking at which semantic components (manner, path, cause) are encoded in the verb and satellites and how they are combined following Hendriks, Hickmann & Demagny (2008). Gestures are analyzed regarding the semantic components of motion they convey (path, manner & cause; path & cause; manner & cause; ground).
The data are currently being analyzed. Preliminary results already show some tendencies. There seems to be more variation in French than in Dutch in terms of speech combinations, which corresponds to Hendriks, Hickmann & Demagny (2008)’s findings on French and English. L1DS tend to conflate manner and cause in the verb and combine it with a path-satellite and a gesture conveying manner, cause, and path as in Figure 1. Surprisingly, L1FS sometimes encode only manner and cause in speech. These utterances are often accompanied by gestures conveying cause, manner, and path. Still, L1DS tend to produce these gestures more often than L1FS. L2 learners also tend to convey these three semantic components in their gestures. Finally, they sometimes use these gestures as compensation gestures: they describe the event as a transfer event in speech and as a caused motion event in gesture as in Figure 2 where the participant used the neutral verb geven [give] instead of gooien [throw] and show in their gesture that he actually throws Sylvester.