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 >> >> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web >> interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select >> "Join or leave the list" >> >> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ >> > > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface > at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html > and select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/