Resumen de On the use of spatial prepositions: differences in L1 and L2 English
This study looks at the different ways in which spatial prepositions are used by native speakers and German learners of English. It is based on learner and reference corpora containing elicited written narratives of a wordless picture story (Mayer 1969). A Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis reveals that native speakers of English used spatial prepositions significantly more often in dynamic contexts than did German learners of English. Moreover, we found considerable differences in the use of behind and over. A closer look at the contexts in which these two prepositions occurred showed that they were mainly used for descriptions of the same scene. The results suggest that certain events are conceptualized in different ways by speakers of English and German. We will discuss L1 transfer and teaching-induced factors as possible explanations for these differences and propose to incorporate corpus methodology into the foreign language classroom.
