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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>>
>
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