> Bob,
I would recommend the first section of Langacker's "Cognitive
Grammar" (2008, pp.3-26) for a good overview of how his approach differs
from the generative. I think Adele Goldberg handles it well in the opening
chapter of "Constructions at Work". Again, I think it would be silly to
pretend you and I are resolving this when so much work is being done by
other people. In many ways, this is a return to a more traditional view of
language.
I think Langacker does a wonderful job handling count and non-count
(mass nouns) as cognitive categories. There are some very interesting
ways in which nouns shift from one category to another. "Yellow", for
example, is not normally a count noun, but we can say "I like the
yellow" or "I tried several yellows." "I don't like many wines." "He
had too many beers." "I love diamond." (non-count). "She wore several
diamonds." (count.) I suspect that these are learned as we pick up
vocabulary. There's no reason to believe the count/non-count
distinction is a purely formal system, separate from our interaction
with the world and our ways of talking about it and conceptualizing it.
Is "wood" count or mass? "They broke through the plaster to wood." "He
tried several woods before he found one that looked right." The
question came up in my class just the other day about "trouble." "He
got into trouble." "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen." These are
fairly dynamic categories.
There can be a number of different reasons why certain structures may
strike us as "not possible" in the language. "Bob likes ice cream
and..." may very well come up in the right kind of context. "I like ice
cream and fudge. Sally likes ice cream and nuts. Bob likes ice cream
and...?" With the right inflection, it would be treated like a sensible
question. An utterance needs motivation, and new utterances need to pay
off before they will be accepted. "She smiled me an invitation."
That's fairly novel, but it works. Smile could become comfortably
di-transitive if we used it that way frequently enough. Frequency
matters.
Cognitive and functional approaches are not naive. They give very
robust explanations for all the phenomena you bring up as "proof"
against them.
Craig
Craig,
>
> You present a view of language to support a perspective on language
> teaching. I question your view of language and therefore reject some of
> your teaching suggestions.
>
> If what you report below is "convincing," then share with us some of the
> convincing explanations.
>
>>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 02/06/09 12:17 PM >>>
>
> Cognitive linguistics has taken on that question very seriously, and I
> find their explanations
> very convincing.
>
> ****
> I presented a number of examples from my experience teaching both native
> and non-native speakers that don't confirm some of your claims about
> language.
>
> Here is a simple piece of evidence about knowledge of English grammar that
> is clearly learned/acquired by ALL native speakers without any instruction
> or mentoring or whatever term you want to use. English makes a
> distinction between count and non-count nouns.
>
> I have NEVER seen a dictionary for native speakers that identifies whether
> the noun is count or non-count. Think about what that means for the
> following claim:
>
> If, in fact, language is learned and not just "activated", and if
> interaction is a huge key to that, and if children differ radically in
> the kinds of language they bring to school, then there are huge reasons
> for rethinking our current practices.
>
> Why don't we have to teach NATIVE speakers of English the count-non-count
> distinction? After all, children "differ radically in the kinds of
> language they bring to school," yet NO ONE seems to have noticed a
> variation in groups about what nouns are count and what nouns are
> non-count. Perhaps, children with respect to this feature of English
> regardless of background get this distinction for free.
>
> Now, look at a dictionary designed for non-native speakers. ALL the nouns
> are identified as being count or non-count. If learning a first language
> is just like any other kind of learning, why do non-native speakers have
> to be explicitly taught the count-noncount distinction and native speakers
> don't? Certainly, it cannot be the case that ALL non-native learners of
> English are stupider than native speakers.
>
> ***
> There is a problem with the following claim.
>
> I use the term "mentoring" very carefully, as opposed to
> "instruction", which probably brings in workbook images and the like. It
> may make more sense to say that language is "learned" than it is that it
> is taught, but it is always learned interactively. It involves intention
> reading and pattern finding, which are normal cognitive processes. I
> like Tomasello's notion of a "joint attentional frame" to describe
> moments in which two people are attending to the same phenomena, perhaps
> finding ways to embody it in words. Those of us who raise our children
> well do that all the time.
>
> If language is learned interactively, then we have two problems.
>
> Problem I: How do we know what isn't possible in the language?
>
> Both sentences 1 and 2 are good echo questions:
>
> 1) Bob likes ice cream and what?
> 2) Bob likes ice cream with what?
>
> However, only (4) is possible and not (3).
>
> 3) *What does Bob like ice cream and?
> 4) What does Bob like ice cream with?
>
> What interactions have we all had that explain these judgments that ALL
> native speakers have?
>
> Problem 2: How do we know a sentence is possible when we have never been
> exposed to it?
>
> The only time I have EVER encountered the following relative clause is as
> an example in a linguistics class.
>
> 5) There is the woman whose daughter my daughter is prettier than?
>
> I maintain we have never had ONE interaction that has a relative clause
> like (5). Yet, every native speaker knows it is possible sentence in
> English.
>
> Finally, let's not confuse correlations of various structures in a
> particular kind of genre and grammatical judgments. Craig writes:
>
> I see a strong interconnection between grammar and genre. Even the corpus
> grammars are finding empirical correlations between the kind of text and
> the kind of grammar that is likely to occur. It is possible to see those
> as functional patterns.
>
> First it is not surprising that certain grammatical constructions tend to
> occur in certain kinds of texts. As someone who has taught ESL, I use
> such facts to determine what kind of tasks I want my students to do to
> practice a particular grammar structure.
>
> However, "empirical correlations" are very different from grammatical
> judgments. Go back to my sentences 1-5. ALL native speakers agree on the
> grammaticality of those sentences. Exactly how far from an "empirical
> correlation" must a text be before it is not an example of a particular
> genre. For example, let's assume that in genre X, there are 5 passive
> voice constructions per 1000 words. If I write a text that has only 3
> passive constructions/1000 words, is it no longer part of that genre? 10
> constructions/1000?
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
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