Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Learning

Theoretical Basics and Experimental Evidence

Andrea Tyler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415802505
• eBook ISBN: 9781135965525
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book illustrates the ways that cognitive linguistics, a relatively new paradigm in language studies, can illuminate and facilitate language research and teaching. The first part of the book introduces the basics of cognitive linguistic theory in a way that is geared toward second language teachers and researchers. The second part of the book provides experimental evidence of the usefulness of applying cognitive linguistics to the teaching of English. Included is a thorough review of the existing literature on cognitive linguistic applications to teaching and cognitive linguistic-based experiments. Three chapters report original experiments which focus on teaching modals, prepositions and syntactic constructions, elements of English that learners tend to find challenging. A chapter on "future directions" reports on an innovative analysis of English conditionals. Pedagogical aids such as diagrams and sample exercises round out this pioneering and innovative text.

PART I

The Basics of
Cognitive Linguistics

1
INTRODUCTION

Where Have We Been and Where Can We Go?

1. Why Should I Read this Book? No Silver Bullets

Learning a language is one of the most complex accomplishments humans achieve. We have known for many years that the story of children mastering their first language effortlessly in a short three- or four-year period is just that, a story. Research has long established that children learning their first language take at least eight years in an immersion situation to master many of the more complex grammatical constructions of their language. They generally do not gain productive control over much of derivational morphology until they are 10 or older. Many aspects of pragmatics take even longer. Given the length of time and attention needed for first language learning, it stands to reason that no new model of the structure of language can radically reduce the difficulty facing adult second language (L2) learners. However, the task of the adult L2 learner in the instructed L2 learning situation has been made even more difficult by the fact that important elements of systematicity that exist in language have not been captured by the traditional view of language. This view has been the mainstay of both descriptive and pedagogical grammars that underlie most modern L2 learning research and English language teaching (ELT) textbooks and materials for the past 50 plus years.

This book introduces a new and very different approach to pedagogical grammar — a cognitive linguistics approach (CL).¹ This approach to L2 grammar and lexis does not offer an easy, guaranteed shortcut for helping L2 students become near-native speakers. What it does offer is a different understanding of the nature and organization of language, one which is more accurate, explanatory and more complete than the traditional view.

The traditional view treats language as a system separate from other cognitive and social abilities, an entity separate unto itself. Being an isolated system, disconnected from general cognitive processes and conceptual structure, language has traditionally been understood as operating under its own set of rules and properties, most of which have been assumed to be largely arbitrary, idiosyncratic and mysterious. This view tends to represent language as a set of rules (often attempting to represent “alternating,” “synonymous” sentence patterns, such as so-called dative alternation or active—passive alternation, as transforms of a basic pattern), a list of vocabulary items that plug into the rules, and a list of exceptions to the rules. The approach to language learning that accompanies this view of language emphasizes the need for the learner to master the rules and memorize the exceptions.²

A CL account differs radically from the traditional perspective by emphasizing that language is best understood as a reflection of general cognitive processes, the highly social nature of humans as a species, and the unique ways that humans experience and interact with the physical world. This last point is the notion of embodied meaning. In addition, CL emphasizes the recurrent organizing principles that are found at all “levels” of language. So, for example, in the traditional approach, metaphor is understood as only pertaining to limited aspects of non-literal language and is largely treated as outside the domain of systematic investigation. In contrast, the CL approach treats metaphor (i.e., understanding entities, actions, or events, in one domain, the target domain, in terms of entities, actions, or events in another domain, the source domain) as a fundamental aspect of human cognition, which is pervasively reflected in language.

Under a CL account, the same principles of metaphorical extension, force dynamics, and sensory perception that account for semantic extension of open-class lexical items, such as grasp and head, and semantic extensions of closed-class lexical items, such as prepositions, are also central to a systematic, principled account of verb argument structure and the particular syntactic patterns in which individual verbs occur. (This will be discussed extensively in Chapter 6.) Relatively recently, the traditional approach has acknowledged another layer of the language system which involves functional or pragmatic aspects of language use. Examples of this layer include politeness formulas and their contexts of use (e.g., in making a polite request, use could instead of can, Could I ask a favor?); speech act formulas (such as set phrases for offering an apology or making a complaint); and register differences (e.g., using sweat in more informal contexts and perspire in formal ones). While I applaud the language teaching approaches and materials that include pragmatic and discourse aspects of language use, I reject the notion that pragmatics should be largely treated as an “add-on,” disconnected from the formal grammatical and lexical structure of the language. Within a CL approach, pragmatic inferencing is understood as a ubiquitous cognitive process fundamental to how we interpret the world that surrounds us, one component of which includes language. CL analyses present pragmatic inferencing as integral to any interpretation of language, to semantic extension and grammatical extension. Moreover, many aspects of politeness, for instance using could and would, rather than can and will, turn out to be motivated aspects of a principled system.

As we will see, a significant disadvantage of the traditional perspective is that it fails to take into account our everyday interactions with and understanding of the world and their effect on language. One significant consequence of this perspective for pedagogical grammars, upon which ELT teachers rely and ELT textbooks are based, is that functions associated with distinct grammatical constructions, e.g., the full range of different functions associated with tense (e.g., time-reference, attenuation, counterfactuals, etc.) have been at worst ignored, or at best, presented in piecemeal fashion, with no indication that these functions are related to one another and so motivated (see Tyler & Evans 2001a).³ Hence the traditional grammars fail to inform the L2 researcher and the language teacher of significant regularities and systematic connections in the language.

This book takes a quite different perspective, one which asks you, as a professional in the area of L2 learning, to set aside your established ways of thinking about the nature of language. Rather than thinking about language as a set of rules, each with a set of exceptions for L2 learners to memorize, the CL approach asks you to consider the social and physical world you operate in every day, general human cognitive processes, and the connections between that social—physical world and the structure of language itself. Here is a simple example: Everyday co-occurrences we observe between the rising level of a river and an increased amount of rainfall or the rising level of liquid in a measuring cup and an increase in amount of liquid, turn out to be reflected in language use.

We find many instances of language that literally refer to physical elevation being used to talk about increases in amount. For instance, in a sentence like The price of that stock is up, in which the monetary amount the stock is worth is held to have increased, we find language that literally refers to physical elevation, up, being used to refer to an increase in a rather abstract area, monetary value. In fact, this connection is so strongly conventionalized in English that it is often difficult for us not to talk, and think, about an increase in the amount of something without talking, and thinking, in terms of an increase in height. The two parameters of our experience of the external, physical world (quantity and vertical elevation) are clearly distinct. An increase in amount of liquid can result in a bigger puddle without resulting in an increase in height; similarly, an increase in amount of weight can result in an expanded waistline which extends horizontally rather than vertically. Nevertheless, quantity and physical elevation do correlate with one another in everyday experience in an extremely tight and recurring fashion. After all, every time we fill a glass, as the height of the liquid increases so does the quantity. Returning to The price of that stock is up, the point is prices do not literally rise in elevation, but we talk about such an increase as if they did. In other words, we use language that relates to our experience of the physical world to understand and talk about more abstract notions, such as the increase in value of some stock. This is a form of metaphor which cognitive linguists calls experiential correlation. (We will discuss experiential correlation in more detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 5). In this example, cognitive linguists call the domain of vertical elevation the source domain and the domain of the abstract notion amount as the target domain. The target domain is understood and talked about in terms of the source domain.

This exemplifies one fundamental way in which language reflects social-physical experience. In the sentence described above we have seen that up is interpreted as having a meaning of “more” rather than literally relating to vertical elevation. The traditional view would represent this non-literal use of up as idiomatic. In contrast, rather than treating this non-literal, additional meaning as an exception to be memorized, a CL approach treats such multiple meanings of lexical items as being systematically related and therefore explainable. No theory of language can eliminate the need for language learners to memorize a good deal of vocabulary. However, a CL approach allows us to represent the multiple meanings and uses of lexical items as motivated, that is, reflecting a principled pattern. Although understanding the systematic motivation for extensions of word meaning (through recurrent processes such as experiential correlation) does not automatically allow the learner to predict which extended meanings the target language has developed, it does provide a set of principles that can act as a schema for organizing and acquiring new lexical information. Work in psychology has long established that humans learn new information more easily and reliably when they can relate it to established schemas (e.g., Rummelhart, 1981; Wilson & Anderson, 1986). Presumably once language learners have a systematic, motivated explanation for meaning extension, it will be easier for them to interpret and remember related lexical items that they encounter. Importantly, a CL approach explains much more than the related meanings of lexical items. We will see in the chapters that follow that a CL approach offers a coherent account of a number of the most difficult aspects of (English) grammar — from prepositions to modals to which verbs occur in the double object construction. It also offers insightful explanations for many functional and discourse patterns, for instance, why languages tend to use past tense ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Learning
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Basics of Cognitive Linguistics
• Part II Applying Cognitive Linguistics
• Appendix A Sample Materials used for Group Work with Masters of Law Students
• Appendix B Materials for Tyler, Mueller and Ho (2010b): Cognitive Group
• Appendix C Traditional Group Materials
• Appendix D Traditional Group: Self-instruction Exercises
• Appendix E A Representative Diagram Explaining Elements from the Preposition Experiments
• References
• Index