The subject of this thesis is presence of endpoints in child-directed speech of Czech native speakers. It is based on researches, which show that czech language prefers holistic perspective. This occur for exemple in description of the motion event; a speaker tends to include the endpoint. Thanks to its holistic perspective, Czech language is unique among other Slavic languages, which use a phasal perspective. The phasal perspective highlights the motion process instead of the endpoint. There are several reasons, why Czech language uses holistic perspective: the most common is the proximity to German langugae, which also uses holistic perspective, and specific category of aspect. My thesis examines whether children can learn one of the feature of the holistic perspective, often referring to endpoints in the description of motion events. Research data consists in transcribing informal conversations between children and parents over incentives made for this purpose. I examine total amount od endpoints and how they are expressed. The analysis of the data proves high concentration of endpoints and also proves, that parents direct child's attention to them.

Motion events are ubiquitous in conversation, from describing a tiresome commute to recounting a burglary. These situations, where an entity changes location, consist of four main semantic components: Motion (the movement), Figure (the entity moving), Ground (the object or objects with respect to which the Figure carries out the Motion) and Path (the route taken). Two additional semantic components can occur simultaneously: Manner (the way the Motion occurs) and Cause (the source of/reason for the Motion). Languages differ in preferences for provision and packaging of semantic components in descriptions. It has been suggested, in the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, that these preferences influence the conceptualisation of events (such as their memorisation). This thesis addresses questions relating to the description and memory of Motion events in British Sign Language (BSL) and English. It compares early BSL (acquired before age seven) and late BSL (acquired after age 16) descriptions of Motion events and investigates whether linguistic preferences influence memory. Comparing descriptions by early signers and late signers indicates where their linguistic preferences differ, providing valuable knowledge for interpreters wishing to match early signers. Understanding how linguistic preferences might influence memory contributes to debates around the connection between language and thought. The experimental groups for this study were: deaf early BSL signers, hearing early BSL signers, deaf late BSL signers, hearing late BSL signers and hearing English monolinguals. Participants watched target Motion event video clips before completing a memory and attention task battery. Subsequently, they performed a forced-choice recognition task where they saw each target Motion event clip again alongside a distractor clip that differed in one semantic component. They selected which of the two clips they had seen in the first presentation. Finally, participants were filmed describing all of the target and distractor video clips (in English for English monolinguals and BSL for all other groups). The Motion event descriptions were coded for the inclusion and packaging of components. Linguistic descriptions were compared between languages (English and BSL) and BSL group. Statistical models were created to investigate variation on the memory and attention task battery and the recognition task. Results from linguistic analysis reveal that English and BSL are similar in the components included in descriptions. However, packaging differs between languages. English descriptions show preferences for Manner verbs and spatial particles to express Path ('run out'). BSL descriptions show preferences for serial verb constructions (using Manner and Path verbs in the same clause). The BSL groups are also similar in the components they include in descriptions. However, the packaging differs, with hearing late signers showing some English-like preferences and deaf early signers showing stronger serial verb preferences. Results from the behavioural experiments show no overall relationship between language group and memory. I suggest that the similarity of information provided in English and BSL descriptions undermines the ability of the task to reveal memory differences. However, results suggest a link between individual linguistic description and memory; marking a difference between components in linguistic description is correlated with correctly selecting that component clip in the recognition task. I argue that this indicates a relationship between linguistic encoding and memory within each individual, where their personal preference for including certain semantic components in their utterances is connected to their memory for those components. I also propose that if the languages were more distinct in their inclusion of information then there may have been differences in recognition task scores. I note that further research is needed across modalities to create a fuller picture of how information is included and packaged cross-modally and how this might affect individual Motion event memory.

Lo scopo principale di questo lavoro è stato quello di determinare, tramite una ricerca sperimentale sull’acquisizione del russo da parte di italofoni, come la struttura del discorso e la gerarchizzazione sintattica si collocano reciprocamente sull’asse tra linguospecificità e universalità. Per questo è stato creato un corpus (4101 clausole) di racconti narrativi scritti in russo L2, russo L1 e italiano L1, che è stato analizzato in termini di scelte preferenziali dei parlanti. Sono state confrontate le dinamiche acquisizionali tra vari gruppi di parlanti in base al seguente criterio: “più un livello è linguospecifico, più è resistente all’acquisizione delle norme della seconda lingua”. I risultati della ricerca hanno dimostrato che la struttura del discorso oppone più resistenza all’acquisizione delle norme della seconda lingua rispetto alla gerarchizzazione sintattica. Ciò suggerisce che la prima, che è il livello linguistico più vicino al pensiero, è più linguospecifica dell’ultima, e che quindi la linguospecificità del livello del discorso è maggiore di zero. Inoltre nel corpus sono state rilevate evidenze che sostengono che l’uso della lingua è strutturato e la sua struttura è linguospecifica, e che probabilmente il thinking for speaking viene formato non tanto dalle caratteristiche formali della lingua madre quanto dalle specifiche del suo uso. / The goal of this thesis is to position discourse structure and macro-syntax on the axis between language specificity and language universality through an experimental investigation of the acquisition of the Russian language by italophones. To conduct my research, I collected a 4,101-clause corpus of written narratives in Russian L2, Russian L1 and Italian L1, and I analyzed it from the point of view of the speakers’ preferential choices. I compared the acquisition dynamics within different groups of speakers using the following criterion: “more a phenomenon is resistant to the acquisition of the second language norms, more it is language specific”. My research indicated that preferences on the discourse level are more resistant than those on the macro-syntactic level. This suggests that the former, which is the linguistic level closest to thought, is more language specific than the latter, and that thereby the language specificity of the discourse level is greater than zero. I also provide evidence that the habitual structures of the linguistic use are language specific, and that the phenomenon of first language thinking in second language speaking is more significantly impacted by the specifics of the language use than by the formal structure of the mother tongue.

This thesis is about whether language affects thinking. It deals with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we speak influences the way we think. This hypothesis is investigated in the domain of caused motion (e.g., ‘The man rolled the tyre into the garage’), by looking at Spanish and Swedish, two languages that show striking differences in how motion events are encoded. The thesis consists of four studies. The first two focus on native speakers of Spanish and Swedish. Study I compares how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe the same set of caused motion events, directing the spotlight at how variable the descriptions are in each language. The results confirm earlier findings from semantic typology regarding the dominant ways of expressing the events in each language: Spanish behaves like a verb-framed language and Swedish like a satellite-framed language (Talmy, 2000). Going beyond previous findings, the study demonstrates—using the tools of entropy and Monte Carlo simulations—that there is markedly more variability in Spanish than in Swedish descriptions. Study II tests whether differences in how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe caused motion events are reflected in how they think about such events. Using a novel similarity arrangement task, it is found that Spanish and Swedish speakers partly differ in how they represent caused motion events if they can access language during the task. However, the differences disappear when the possibility to use language is momentarily blocked by an interference task. The last two studies focus on Swedish learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). Study III explores how Swedish learners (compared to native Spanish speakers) adapt their Spanish motion descriptions to recently encountered input. Using insights from the literature on structural priming, we find that Swedish learners initially expect to encounter in their L2, Spanish, those verb types that are typical in Swedish (manner verbs like ‘roll’) but that, with increasing proficiency, their expectations become increasingly attuned to the typical Spanish pattern of using path verbs (like ‘enter’).  These expectations are reflected in the way L2 learners adapt their own production to the Spanish input. Study IV asks whether recent linguistic experience in an L2 can affect how L2 learners think about motion events. It is found that encountering motion descriptions in the L2 that emphasize different types of information (path or manner) leads L2 speakers to perceive similarity along different dimensions in a subsequent similarity arrangement task. Taken together, the thesis argues that the study of the relation between language and thought affords more valuable insights when not posed as an either-or question (i.e., does language affect thought or not?). In this spirit, the thesis contributes to the wider aim of investigating the conditions under which language does or does not affect thought and explores what the different outcomes tell us about language, thought, and the intricate mechanisms that relate them. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

“Linguistic relativity” has been studied for a long time. Many empirical studies have been conducted on cross-linguistic differences to find support for the influence of language on thought. This study proposes viewpoint (defined as the point from which the conceptualizer sees and construes the event) as a cross-linguistic difference, and explores whether the linguistic constraint and preference of subjective/objective construal can affect one’s cognitive activity as viewpoint. As Japanese is a subjectivity-prominent language whereas Swedish is not, data elicited from monolingual adolescences (aged 12-16) in Japan and Sweden were compared. A set of tasks which consisted of non-verbal tasks (scene-visualisation) and verbal tasks (narrative of comic strips) was performed in order to elicit the participants’ viewpoints. The same set of tasks was assigned to simultaneous Swedish-Japanese bilingual adolescences in Sweden. The bilinguals took the set of non-verbal and verbal tasks twice, once in Swedish and once in Japanese. The results demonstrated a clear difference between the monolingual groups both in the non-verbal and verbal tasks. The Japanese monolinguals showed a higher preference for subjective viewpoint. The bilinguals’ viewpoint preference had a tendency to fall between that of monolinguals of both languages. This finding indicates that the bilinguals’ viewpoint preference may be influenced by both languages. This study demonstrates for the first time that the speaker’s viewpoint can be affected not only in verbal tasks but also in non-verbal tasks. The findings suggest that a language may influence the speaker’s way of construing events. It is also implied that the influences from different languages in bilinguals can be bidirectional. However, the influence does not seem to be all or nothing. Regardless of the language, one’s event construal is more or less the same. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that the linguistic subjectivity in a language tends to counteract the universal construal. / Språkrelativitet (Linguistic relativity) har studerats under lång tid. Många empiriska studier har studerat om och i så fall hur språk påverkar tänkandet och eventuella skillnader mellan olika språk. Denna studie föreslår perspektivpreferens för att beskriva ur vilket perspektiv en berättare återger skeenden. Studien utforskar om ett språks lingvistiska begränsningar och preferens för subjektiva/objektiva tolkningar av skeenden påverkar personers kognitiva aktivitet som val av perspektiv. Japanska är ett tydligt subjektivt framträdande språk medan svenskan inte är det. Därför jämfördes data från enspråkiga ungdomar (12-16 år gamla) i Japan och i Sverige. För att klarlägga deltagarnas perspektivpreferens genomfördes två delstudier, dels en icke-verbal studie (en scenvisualisering) och dels en verbal studie (ett återberättande av tecknade serier). Samma delstudier genomfördes också till simultant svensk-japanska tvåspråkiga ungdomar i Sverige. De tvåspråkiga deltagarna gjorde de verbala och icke-verbala delstudierna i två omgångar, en gång på svenska och en gång på japanska. Resultatet visade en klar skillnad mellan de enspråkiga grupperna, både i den icke-verbala och verbala delstudien. De japanska enspråkiga deltagarna visade högre preferens för subjektiva tolkningar. De tvåspråkiga deltagarnas perspektivpreferens hade en tendens att komma mellan de enspråkiga deltagarnas preferenser. Detta indikerar att de tvåspråkigas val av perspektiv påverkades av deras tvåspråkighet. Studien visar för första gången att berättarens val av perspektiv kan påverkas inte bara i verbala uppgifter utan också i icke-verbala uppgifter. Resultaten från studien indikerar att ett språk kan påverka en berättares sätt att tolka händelser, och att påverkan från de olika språken hos tvåspråkiga kan vara dubbelriktad. Oberoende av språk återges skeenden på ett likartat sätt. Studien indikerar emellertid att lingvistisk subjektivitet i ett språk tenderar att motverka ett universellt återgivande av perspektiv.