Keywords
spatial language
spatial relations
location markers
language typology
Estonian
Chinese
Polish
How to Cite
Abstract
This study aimed to understand how explicit instruction to Chinese learners of Estonian on how to use the Estonian postpositions küljes ‘attached to’ and otsas ‘at the tip, attached to the tip’, which do not have conceptual counterparts in Chinese, influences their usage, and whether it is easier to produce or comprehend them. Additionally, this study investigated whether it is easier for Chinese native speakers to acquire a native-like way of expressing these spatial relations if a language (in this study Polish) has a similar logic to Chinese for expressing spatial relations in instances where Estonian native speakers use the postpositions küljes and otsas. In order to answer these questions, three experiments were conducted: two picture description tasks (one with Chinese learners of Estonian [n=9] and one with Chinese learners of Polish [n=17]) and one sentence comprehension task with the same group of Chinese learners of Estonian. The results revealed that minimal instruction on the Estonian postpositions küljes and otsas is sufficient to elicit a significant rise in production of those postpositions in comparison to Chinese learners of Estonian who did not receive such instruction. The results suggest that there is no marked difference in the difficulty between production and comprehension of these postpositions. Furthermore, the results seem to indicate that for Chinese native speakers acquiring conceptually new means in Estonian to express spatial support relations by using the Estonian postpositions küljes and otsas to describe spatial relations is no more difficult than acquiring conceptually similar means in Polish.
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