Applied Construction Grammar

Sabine De Knop, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sabine De Knop, Gaëtanelle Gilquin

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9783110456189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Current research within the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG) has mainly adopted a theoretical or descriptive approach, neglecting the more applied perspective and especially the question of how language acquisition and pedagogy can benefit from a CxG-based approach. The present volume explores various aspects of "Applied Construction Grammar" through a collection of studies that apply CxG and CxG-inspired approaches to relevant issues in L2 acquisition and teaching. Relying on empirical data and covering a wide range of constructions and languages, the chapters show how the cross-fertilization of CxG and L2 acquisition/teaching can improve the description of learners' use of constructions, provide theoretical insights into the processes underlying their acquisition (e.g. with reference to inheritance links or transfer from the L1), or lead to novel teaching practices and resources aimed to help learners make the generalizations that native speakers make naturally from the input they receive.

II Constructionist approaches to L2 learning and teaching

Thomas Herbst

Foreign language learning is construction learning – what else? Moving towards Pedagogical Construction Grammar1

Abstract: It is argued in this article that linguistics has a contribution to make to the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Using examples from textbooks of English used at German schools, it is shown that there are areas in which categories of traditional grammar are employed in an unreflected and unhelpful way. The article sets out to show that the framework of usage-based and constructionist approaches combined with corpus linguistic analyses could result in more adequate and much simpler descriptions of the linguistic facts and outlines a few general principles of a Pedagogical Construction Grammar.

Keywords: cognitive linguistics; construction; construction grammar; corpus; foreign language teaching; grammar; traditional grammar; tense; terminology; usage-based; valency; vocabulary

1 Linguistics and foreign language teaching

There are no particularly obvious parallels between managers of national football teams and linguists, but they have one thing in common: they are faced with millions of people who think they know better. While football managers can at least convince the fans by winning matches, linguists are in a much more difficult position because there is no comparable measure of success. And even if there were, nobody would care very much (because there are no fans either). As linguists, we will just have to accept the fact that the general public doesn’t grant us the same amount of expertise in our field that they would to a neurologist, an archaeologist or a nuclear physicist. At the same time there seems to be more general awareness and recognition of progress in many sciences than there is in language studies. If a 21st century schoolbook for physics were to say that the elements out of which the different substances of the world consist include water and fire, there would be a public outcry. But of course, no physics books would say any such thing. If 21st century teaching materials for the English language say that the parts of speech sentences are made up of include prepositions and conjunctions, most people will accept this as one of the facts of the English language. If students are taught that one must distinguish between a gerund and a participle in English and fail to see the difference, they tend to think that (English) grammar is difficult (and best be ignored) or that they are too stupid to understand English grammar (and thus had better ignore it). It would not occur to them that it is neither their fault nor that of the language, but that the blame is to be put entirely on a rather strange way of talking about the English language.

It is extremely difficult to change established patterns of thinking in any area. From what we know, during the times of Kopernikus, Kepler and Galilei scholars and laypeople were not exactly enthusiastic to accept that a view of the cosmos in which the earth revolves around the sun may be more appropriate than a view according to which the sun describes a squiggly course around the earth. In the case of language studies, few are prepared to make a comparable effort. And fewer even would be prepared to put their money on it. But this is precisely what is needed. Just imagine some (theoretical) linguists arrived at the conclusion that the established distinction between adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions is not particularly appropriate to the description of present-day English and were to subsume words such as here, in and since under one class and call them all prepositions, what chance would they have to find a publisher who would publish a dictionary actually classifying here as a preposition?2 There is no reason to be particularly optimistic about that. Pullum (2009: 271) describes this situation in the following terms:

The traditional categorizations given in the dictionaries for numerous items are simply in error. Some brave dictionary publisher must take the risk of being the first to abandon mistaken but well entrenched traditions, and of being out of step with all other dictionary publishers for a while as a result. That is not a small thing to ask: no publisher wants to have a dictionary written up in library magazines as too radical for a school librarian to recommend for purchase. But the problem is that in the area of English grammar the educated world has ceased to evolve, learn, or rethink; the whole subject has been frozen in time for the best part of 200 years.

So far, no dictionary publisher has taken this risk (although, as will be shown later, there are some rather positive developments in EFL lexicography).

Of course, classifying here as a preposition is a pretty silly thing to do when everyone knows it is an adverb. Not that anyone would really know what an adverb “is” or that the adverb had ever been the centre of the linguistic universe – but apparently even such a minor change in grammatical terminology has very little chance of being implemented in dictionaries or textbooks. Linguists who attempt to apply the descriptive apparatus of a particular framework are up against a massive bulwark of a firmly established tradition of traditional language teaching.3

The question is why this is so. Surely one reason is to be sought in the fact that it is difficult to pin down progress in a discipline in which there are so many different approaches – in part addressing different questions, in part addressing the same questions – which hardly ever result in a generally accepted solution. How can insights be applied to language teaching of a discipline that has devoted considerable attention to, say, the problem of how to analyse the relation between They loaded the wagon with hay and They loaded hay onto the wagon for at least four decades4 without solving the problem? Of course, how to deal with this alternation may seem a relatively marginal problem with respect to school teaching (although, of course, the underlying theoretical issues are not) but there is no unanimous agreement on such fundamental questions such as how many and which word classes are most appropriately postulated for a language such as English either (and very likely there never can be because any such classification is determined by its purpose up to a point). So even if textbook authors and dictionary makers were willing to incorporate the latest insights of linguistics, it would be almost impossible to achieve consensus amongst linguists of different schools what these insights actually are.

Of course, by no means all linguistic research is directly relevant to school teaching, neither are all theoretical approaches. Chomsky (1973: 234) states this quite clearly when he says:

I am, frankly, rather sceptical about the significance, for the teaching of languages, of such insights and understanding as have been attained in linguistics and psychology.

Considering that Chomsky’s theories have as a central element assumptions about L1 acquisition, this scepticism may seem rather surprising, although perhaps justified if what he had in mind is a direct application of the tree diagrams of that phase of transformational grammar.5

On the whole, however, I would argue that linguistics has a substantial contribution to make to the teaching of foreign languages (and also to L1–instruction, which, however, will not be discussed in this article).6 It concerns two main iss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• I Introduction
• II Constructionist approaches to L2 learning and teaching
• III Crosslinguistic applications of constructionist approaches
• IV Constructing a constructicon for L2 learners
• Index
• Footnotes