Preposizioni "a", "in", "per", "tra". L’italiano L2 di parlanti polacchi
The Prepositions "a", "in", "per", and "tra": Italian L2 of Polish Speakers

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the learning of some spatial prepositions in Italian L2 by Polish learners. Italian and Polish differ in at least two ways, as Polish expresses syntactic relations by a full case system, while Italian relies only on prepositions. More importantly, according to Talmy’s classification, Polish is a satellite-framed language while Italian is verb-framed, but later studies have shown that these categories are not perfectly binary but fuzzy.In the learning of prepositions, three elements are in play: a natural progression from simpler to more complex prepositions; the conceptualisation of the event in which the prepositions are used to express spatial relations; and the semantic categorisation of the participants into the event, in particular the basic one, Ground. By means of different elicitation techniques (questionnaires, frog story, and written tasks), many oral and written texts have been collected from Polish learners of Italian of different levels of competence. It has been revealed that the influence of the motion-event typology affects the learning of the motion expressions in an irrelevant proportion; this is probably due to the fact that Polish, like other Slavic languages, appears to be less satellite-framed than Germanic languages, being characterised by the weak autonomy of the verbal prefixes. The inappropriate uses of prepositions confirm the natural progression of complexity, and the semantic categorisation of the Ground also exerts an influence. In any case, the interplay of these different forces gives rise to different personal idiosyncrasies.

• Details
• Contents