Expressions of motion events in German: an integrative constructionist approach for FLT

Abstract

Expressions of motion reflect the conceptualization of events central to human beings. Most studies on motion have focused on one facet of motion (e.g. typological differences, speaker’s perspective, location/motion prepositions) or on one specific construction like the caused motion construction or the intransitive locative construction. This means that they have dealt with isolated, scattered constructions, while ignoring overall conceptual and linguistic specificities as well as interconnections between constructions. The paper adopts an alternative approach which starts from the construal of the motion concept, the semantics of constructions and the lexicalization preferences in a specific language, thereby focusing on the family of German constructions of directed motion. The family concept can be exploited in foreign language teaching to foster a more efficient learning of such constructions. The paper discusses some strategies based on scaffolding and embodiment.

Keywords

• expressions of directed motion
• family of constructions
• foreign language teaching
• scaffolding
• embodiment