The Representation of Motion Events in English and German: An Empirical Investigation of Motion Event Encoding of Native Speakers and Learners

The encoding of motion event components is a central element in determining the nature of linguistic and conceptual representations underlying motion event construal. This work approaches the verbalization and conceptualization of motion events in German and English from a theoretical point of view and on the basis of a corpus study, an online survey, and an in-person experiment. The research focuses on the investigation of different factors determining motion event construal of native speakers and learners by examining cognitive variables i.e., visual endpoint salience and cognitive cost caused by non-habitual aspect use and grammatical factors i.e., grammatical viewpoint aspect.