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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