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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