Problemi di acquisizione del ceco da parte di parlanti di madrelingua italiana: il caso dei verbi di moto

The contribution is devoted to the lexicalization strategies of intransitive motion events in the acquisition of Czech as a second language by Italian adult tutored learners. According to Talmy’s influential typological classification (1985), languages encode motion in two different ways: in Satellite-framed languages the verbal root expresses the Manner of motion, while the Path component is expressed by another element in the clause, as in Czech vy-plout “out-flow”; in Verb-framed languages the verbal root expresses instead the Path component, as in Italian uscire, while the Manner of motion is often leaved unexpressed. Subsequent research on motion events has led to a revision of Talmy’s typology (Schwarze 1985, Bernini 2006a, Beavers et al. 2010 among others). In the paper we adopt the framework proposed by Beavers et al. (2010). The data considered consist of audiorecorded narratives of the Frog Story (Mayer 1969) produced by ten tutored Intermediate Italian learners of Czech L2 and ten Czech mother tongue speakers. In their choice of lexicalization strategies of intransitive motion events in Czech, Italian learners appear to be influenced by the lexicalization strategy dominant in their L1: when they express the Path component by using a prefix, they tend to use a verb which leaves the Manner component unspecified; when they use a verb specifying the Manner component, they tend to avoid the use of a directional prefix, leaving the Path component unexpressed. These regularities are interpreted on the basis of the restriction existing in Italian in the expression of Manner of motion in directed motion sentences.