Crosslinguistic influence and motion events in multiple language acquisition

Résumé

Multilingualism is the dominance or the control of three or more languages within the same individual. Traditionally multilingualism was considered as a rare phenomenon but in the current world we live in multilingualism has switched from being an exception to a more common and general phenomenon due to many new world’s situations we are living now such as: globalization, media, network communication, job requirements and travelling. Multilingualism is now a very common phenomenon in many parts of the world. The Galician community in Spain for example is one of the best examples to illustrate this. The Galician people in Spain speak two languages as their mother tongue: Galician and Spanish. The Galician language has more tendency to be the L1 for the Galicians especially in the capital city Santiago, However in some places in Galicia the Spanish language seems to be the L1 and enjoys more presence and influence such as in Vigo city. English there is learnt as L3 at schools since childhood and enjoys a significant social and professional importance. This kind of fields with multilingual populations are very suitable for motion events and crosslinguistic research due to the linguistic and cultural diversity that exist there. Research into motion events is developing and many aspects of this research have been investigated. However, most of those studies have investigated motion events from a learner or bilingual perspective leaving the multilingual field unexplored. Our objective in this research is to shed light into this field and to explore and investigate motion events and crosslinguistic influence in a multilingual context. Multilingual acquisition will be studied in a field in which L1 and L2 are already acquired and established allowing us to have a clear and close observation and analysis of motion events and crosslinguistic influence between L1, L2 and L3.