The prepositions a, in, per, and tra: Italian L2 of Polish speakers

This article deals with the learning of some spatial prepositions in Italian L2 by Polish learners. Italian and Polish differ in at least two ways, as Polish expresses syntactic relations by a full case system, while Italian relies only on prepositions. More importantly, according to Talmy’s classification, Polish is a satellite-framed language while Italian is verb-framed, but later studies have shown that these categories are not perfectly binary but fuzzy.
In the learning of prepositions, three elements are in play: a natural progression from simpler to more complex prepositions; the conceptualisation of the event in which the prepositions are used to express spatial relations; and the semantic categorisation of the participants into the event, in particular the basic one, Ground.
By means of different elicitation techniques (questionnaires, frog story, and written tasks), many oral and written texts have been collected from Polish learners of Italian of different levels of competence. It has been revealed that the influence of the motion-event typology affects the learning of the motion expressions in an irrelevant proportion; this is probably due to the fact that Polish, like other Slavic languages, appears to be less satellite-framed than Germanic languages, being characterised by the weak autonomy of the verbal prefixes. The inappropriate uses of prepositions confirm the natural progression of complexity, and the semantic categorisation of the Ground also exerts an influence. In any case, the interplay of these different forces gives rise to different personal idiosyncrasies.

A Model for Presentation of Italian Prepositions Expressing Cause and Serbian Cases in Didactic Material

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for a didactic representation of Italian prepositions and their Serbian equivalents that could facilitate 1. the comprehension and acquisition of Italian prepositions by Serbian learners of L2 Italian, and 2. possibly also the comprehension and acquisition of Serbian cases by Italian learners of L2 Serbian. Italian prepositional constructions and Serbian morphological cases may express the same syntactic and semantic functions. Taken separately, both Italian prepositions and Serbian cases have been studied in great detail and in depth, not only from the point of view of inflectional morphology, but also from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, the functions that these categories perform in the two languages have to date been compared only sporadically and in very general terms, without any attempts of a systematic and exhaustive contrastive analysis. Additionally, the authors of didactic materials intended for Serbian speakers learning Italian, as well as Italian speakers learning Serbian as an L2, often do not pay sufficient attention to a contrastive representation of Italian prepositions and Serbian cases. For this reason, they still represent one of the most frequent error types during the process of acquisition of the languages in question. Therefore, this paper compares the Italian prepositional constructions consisting of simple prepositions followed by nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs on one side, and their Serbian equivalents on the other side, by means of contrastive analysis methods. The results of our analysis could be applied in the creation of grammars, dictionaries, textbooks, and additional didactic materials for L2 Italian for Serbian learners and for L2 Serbian for Italian learners.