Many thanks, Craig, for those informative comments.   So, in terms of 
potential pedagogical applications, how do you see it happening?

Ron Sheen


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Craig Hancock" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 7:20 AM
Subject: Re: Transformational grammar was: Instruction versus learning


> Ron, Martha,
>   Many of the comments I have been making over the past few months have 
> come from an immersion in cognitive linguistics. When I quote Langacker in 
> saying that his approach is "maximalist, non-reductive, and bottom up", 
> those are core principles of construction grammar. You can think of it as 
> in opposition to generative grammar (and to the theory that would espouse 
> sentence combining as a pedagogical approach) which is minimalist, highly 
> abstract, and top down. Grammar is not innate, but learned, not fixed, but 
> emergent. There isn't a sharp boundary between the lexicon and the 
> grammar. In a rough kind of way, you can say that constructions themselves 
> are meaningful. What we sometimes think of as "rules' of grammar can be 
> thought of as highly generalized patterns. "Give" is di-transitive because 
> giving is thought of as having giver, entity given, and receiver of sorts. 
> The concepts and constructions are inextricably linked.
>   A good description of how language is acquired from a usage-based 
> (construction grammar's most current incarnation) approach is Tomasello's 
> /Constructing a Language, /which looks at language acquisition from 
> infancy onward/. /There's a useful collection of essays edited by Barlow 
> and Kemper called /Usage-Based Models of Language. /I would highly 
> recommend Croft and Cruse's /Cognitive Linguistics/, which gives a nice 
> overview of the field, including the history behind construction grammar. 
> Tomasello edits two collections of essays on the /New Psychology of 
> Language/, which are carefully selected to be of use to psychologists. I 
> would also recommend Adele Goldberg's /Constructions at work. /Everything 
> I read from Joan Bybee is impressive/.
>   /As a school, cognitive linguistics links language to cognition. It is 
> much more empirical than generative approaches. It includes the Lakoff and 
> Johnson branch, which explores the primacy of metaphor within language.
> /   /As far as I can tell, no one has worked out pedagogical applications. 
> The possibilities and implications are enormous.
>   We do have capacity to learn language without direct instruction, and 
> much of language use is routinized to the point where it functions below 
> consciousness. But cognitive linguistics accounts for these truths in very 
> different ways,and in ways that would support far more direct attention to 
> language within the curriculum.
>
> Craig
>
>
> Ronald Sheen wrote:
>> Good question, Martha.   It's new to me too.   It's an approach to
>>  grammar derived from the more general cognitive linguistics
>>
>> It argues that a grammar and its compositional meanings derive from a 
>> store of constructions and that acquiring a language entails learning 
>> those constructions within which are couched what we normally think of as 
>> the building blocks of language.
>>
>>
>> I can say no more than that as I understand no more than that.
>>
>> Ron Sheen
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
>> interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select 
>> "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface 
> at:
>     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ 

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/