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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