Directions for Pedagogical Construction Grammar

Learning and Teaching (with) Constructions

Hans C. Boas

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9783111358482
  9783110746648
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110746778
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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III Learning and teaching constructions

Construction-based teaching of German verbless directives to Italian-speaking learners

Sabine De Knop

Fabio Mollica

Notes: We thank the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper. The article is the result of close collaboration between the two authors; however, the two authors have dealt more specifically with different parts: Sabine De Knop is responsible for Sections 3.1, 3.2, 4 and 5 and Fabio Mollica for Sections 1, 2 and 3.

1 Introduction

At an intermediate or advanced level, language teaching should focus on various differentiated structures which represent authentic ways of expression in the foreign language. One of the grammatical topics that should be dealt with is the way in which speakers can express directive speech acts, i.e. speech acts aiming at causing a specific reaction with the addressee (Finkbeiner 2015: 18). These include giving commands, instructions or advice. Languages have several possibilities to do so. The most common way in German is the use of verbal imperative forms like Gib mir bitte einen Saft (lit. ‘Give me please a juice’)¹ or infinitives, e.g. Alle einsteigen bitte! (lit. ‘All get in please!’). Declarative sentences like Du gibst mir sofort den Schlüssel! (lit. ‘You give me immediately the key!’) or sentences with modal verbs + infinitive are also possible, e.g. Du sollst mir jetzt den Schlüssel geben! (lit. ‘You should give me the key now!’).² Alternatively, passive sentences can also express directive speech acts, e.g. Hier wird jetzt aber gearbeitet! (lit. ‘Here is now but worked!’).

But speakers also have the possibility to use compact forms with adverbs (Germ. Hierher!, lit. ‘here to (me)’ or Italian Avanti!, lit. ‘Come in!’) or so-called “verbless directives” (Jacobs 2008), i.e. verb-free structures which express directive speech acts. Our paper deals with such verbless directives in detail. The first extensive contribution dealing with them is Jacobs’ (2008) study, which examines the potential of a constructionist approach for the exploration of such structures. Jacobs uses the German term “verblose Direktiva” to designate a range of instantiations which all express a motion event as in the following examples.

(1)

Her	mit	dem Geld!
to me	with	the money

‘(Give) To me the money!’

(2)

Ab	ins	Bett!
off into the bed

‘Off to bed!’

(3)

Hinein	ins	Vergnügen!
into	into the	pleasure

‘Let us enjoy!’

These examples have an illocutionary force and belong to the directive illocutionary speech acts in Searle’s taxonomy (1979). They are quite common in German and in some Slavic languages (Wilder 2008). In Romance languages they are possible, but – as we show in this chapter – not so common.³ As is well-known from studies on lexicalization patterns, German as a satellite-framed language (Talmy 2000) expresses motion along a trajectory frequently with satellites, i.e. prepositions and particles (De Knop 2019). Accordingly, verbless directives consisting only of satellites are good candidates to express such motion events.

Because of their illocutionary force, verbless directives mainly appear in oral discourse or in written fictional texts which simulate oral speech. The instances for this study have been extracted from the corpora of the Sketch Engine.⁴ They can be considered to be representative of the actual use of this construction, as they have their origin in oral interaction in internet forums and simulated oral speech in direct discourse of belletristic literature. These instances thus reproduce spoken discourse, although they are realized in written form (for conceptually oral speech see Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) and Feilke and Hennig (2016)). All instances were checked by native speakers to confirm their actual use in present German. Because of their conciseness, verbless directives are favored by speakers and writers to trigger the realization of some intentions. If we compare the following two examples in a mother-child context, we realize that example (4) is more compelling and – depending on the situation – is less friendly, but more energetic or determined than (5):⁵

(4)

Kairi kam mit Kari an.	“So und nun	ab ins Bett”.
	So and now	off into the bed

‘Kairi arrived with Kari. “So and now off to bed”.’

(Sketch Engine, deTenTen13)

(5)

Nun, geh doch bitte ins Bett, wir können morgen noch darüber reden.

Now, go after all please into the bed

‘Now, please go to bed, we can talk about it tomorrow.

With example (4) a quick reaction without any contradiction is expected. Because of their impact several verbless directives can be found in one and the same sentence, as illustrated by (6) and further by (7):

(6)

Gutes Wetter draußen?	Dann rein in die Turnschuhe und ab in den Wald.
	Then into in the sport shoes and off in the wood

‘Good weather outside? Then into the sport shoes and off to the wood.’

(Sketch Engine, deTenTen13)

Our analysis of the corpus data has also shown that verbless directives are frequently found in advertising, e.g. in tourism, because they are concise and should motivate possible addressees to b...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I Introduction
• II Data and methodology in Pedagogical ­Construction Grammar
• III Learning and teaching constructions
• IV Frame-based teaching and learning
• Author Index
• Subject Index