Encoding climbing scenes in English : frequency and patterns in descriptions written by speakers of diverse languages

Abstract

The English verb climb has a greater range of syntactic formulations than its Ladin and Italian counterparts, the majority of which do not take direct objects and most commonly express effortful uphill movement; however, German appears typologically closer to English. As a result, the question arises as to whether English learners with diverse first languages make different lexical and syntactic choices when describing climbing scenes in the target language. Because of diverse cross-linguistic impacts, it is expected that German speakers will employ the English verb climb in more contexts than Ladin and Italian speakers. Trentino-South Tyrolean speakers of Ladin (n = 13), Italian (n = 40), and German (n = 40) describe 12 artworks depicting a figure rising in various surroundings and directions, to confirm this fact. The preceding finding is corroborated by an online video-description task completed by speakers of Ladin (n = 57), Italian (n = 45), and German (n = 45). Despite difficulties distinguishing across multilingual groups of learners, this study reveals disparities amongst student groups with similar multilingual backgrounds. Contrastive assessment of multilingual learners' descriptions of human climbing scenarios indicates tendencies that are likely attributable to cross-linguistic variance.