Many thanks, Craig, for the additional comments.

Ron Sheen

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Craig Hancock" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: Construction grammar was: Transformational grammar was: 
Instruction versus learning


> 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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>>>>
>>>
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>>
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