Ron,
   I'll give you the five minute answer and not the two hour one.
   I think we need to admit that any formal grammar won't translate all 
by itself to reading or writing. If we want to teach formal grammar (and 
I am not against it) we need to find ways to put that knowledge base to 
work or else not complain when people tell us it isn't happening. 
Cognitive and functional approaches don't have that linking problem 
because they are, by their very nature, linked to deeper order concerns. 
If we look, for example, at the huge role of metaphor in all language, 
we have erased the boundary between language and literature. If we look 
at the meaningfulness of constructions, we are already attending to 
applications. The whole argument for or against grammar is something we 
can put into the past, as relevant to prescriptive or formal grammars, 
but not to cognitive or functional ones.
   Of course, there is a huge gap between what's in the theory and 
what's in general knowledge. Progress would come from those of us 
interested in closing the gap.

Craig

Ronald Sheen wrote:
> 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
>>>
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