Language in the Context of Use: Cognitive and Usage-based Approaches to Language and Language Learning
(Select papers from Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics 2003)

Edited by Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim, and Mari Takada
To be published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2005

[Summary of Contributions]

[Back to Andrea Tyler's Home Page]

Overview

The papers in this volume represent cognitive research that relies on naturally-occurring language gathered from observational data or large corpora, thus they provide an unusually strong contextualized, cognitive perspective. The volume offers an exciting set of new cognitive investigations that consider the context in which language is created, the specific purpose for which language is used, and how those factors affect the structure of language.

The volume will be of interest to both researchers and language teaching practitioners. Cognitive linguists, particularly those interested in the relationship between language learning--either first or second--and the structure of language, will find many fresh ideas by several widely recognized leaders in the field. The volume also provides an entry point into cognitive linguistics for applied linguistics, SLA researchers, and second language teachers. While the sections on first and second language learning will be of most direct interests to those in the applied areas, the more theoretical papers also offer important insights for language learning and teaching. For instance, unaccusative and passive constructions have been of considerable interest to SLA researchers and second language teachers because second language learners often have difficulty with these constructions. So, native speakers of Korea and Japanese learning English frequently produce ungrammatical sentences such as “The accident was happened last night”. Archard’s study of French unaccusatives begins to offer an explanation for how these constructions might work in other languages, such as English, and provides a model for how to investigate the issue.

The papers are grouped into four areas: first language acquisition, second language acquisition, signed languages, and construction grammar, conceptual metaphor, and blending. These four areas are representative of the range of topics, perspectives and methodologies addressed at the conference.

 

CONTENTS

Introduction : Andrea Tyler

I. First Language Acquisition

- Melissa Bowerman MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen & Free University of Amsterdam

Constructing semantic categories in first language acquisition

- Michael Israel, University of Maryland, Mental space configurations in child language

- Melissa Smith & Nancy Budwig, Clark University, The development of verb-argument structure in child discourse: On the use of construction variation in peer play

- Ruth Berman & Dorit Ravid, Tel Aviv University, Information packaging in writing and speech: A developmental view

II. Second Language Acquisition

- Nick Ellis Bangor University, Wales, U.K. Usage-based and form-focused SLA: The implicit and explicit learning of constructions

- Lynne Cameron, University of Leeds, U.K. A discourse approach to conceptual metaphor: Explaining metaphors for literacy practices in a school discourse community

- Olga Liamkina, Georgetown University, Making dative a case for semantic analysis: Differences in concept and use between native and non-native speakers of German

- Valentina Marras & Teresa Cadierno, University of Southern Denmark, Spanish ´’gustar’ vs. English ‘like’: A cognitive analysis of the constructions and its implication for SLA

III. Signed Language

- Terry Janzen, University of Manitoba, Perspective shifts in ASL narrative: The problem of clause structure
- Barbara Shaffer, University of New Mexico, BORING: It's anything but

- Sherman Wilcox, University of New Mexico, Iconicity and cognitive grammar in signed language
- Randall Hogue, Michele Bishop, Rachel Brockmann, Kristin Mulrooney, Marie Nadolske, Debra Patkin, Travas Young, & Sarah Taub, Gallaudet University, Count and mass nouns in ASL

IV. Discourse and Corpus Considerations

- Eve Sweetser, UC Berkeley, Discourse structure marking in gesture

- Carol Lynn Moder, Oklahoma State University, It's like making soup: Metaphors and similes in spoken news discourse

- Michel Achard, Rice University, Unaccusativity in French?

 

V. Conceptual Metaphor and Blending

- Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia, Personal pronouns, blending, and narrative viewpoint

- Joseph Grady, Cultural Logic, “Superschemas” and the grammar of metaphorical mappings

- Akiko Fujii , Christian Women’s University -- Tokyo, A Blending Analysis of Humorous Narratives

 

SUMMARY OF CONTRIBUTIONS [Back to Top of Page]

First language acquisition:

Focusing on children’s acquisition of semantics, Bowerman provides an overview of 20 years of research which points to the importance of language in configuring and partitioning conceptual domains. The paper persuasively lays out her case for understanding semantic development as an interactive process deeply embedded in children’s socialization within a particular linguistic community. She presents new evidence that language-particular semantic categories can influence nonlinguistic cognition. In his paper, Israel draws on the CHILDES database in order to examine children’s naturally occurring production of mental state and epistemic modal verbs. He demonstrates that children first successfully use these verbs in narrow discourse routines that fulfill certain prototypical discourse functions. Later uses, which are often flawed, occur when children must simultaneously attend to two contrasting propositions and thus require complex mappings between multiple mental spaces. Smith & Budwig report on an observational study of children’s peer play sessions with focus on the children’s uses of transitive and intransitive constructions. They demonstrate that children use syntactic frames to represent multiple perspectives on a scene. The paper by Berman & Ravid provides an overview of a longitudinal, multi-lingual study of the development of narrative in adolescents’ spoken and written discourse. Although focusing primarily on English and Hebrew, the paper introduces the framework and methodology that was used in a just completed, large-scale study of adolescent narrative in 15 languages.

Second language acquisition

These papers represent some of the most exciting current work at the juncture of second language learning and cognitive and functional theories. Ellis’s paper provides an overview of psycholinguistic evidence that speaks to the role of both explicit and implicit learning in second language learning. The relative importance of these two types of learning has been at the center of research in second language acquisition for the past 15 years. Cameron combines discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory to examine metaphors concerning literacy practice in the discourse of primary school teachers and L2 students. Marras & Cadierno provide a comparative analysis of Spanish intransitive constructions involving verbs such as gustar with English ‘dative’ constructions involving verbs such as like. They argue that utilizing a construction grammar approach and cognitive constructs, such as profiling, offers important insights into the difficulties English learners of Spanish and Spanish learners of English encounter with these constructions.

Signed language

Janzen analyzes the simultaneous, multiple perspectives that routinely occur in signed narrative. He argues that the construct of iconicity helps explain the relation between increasing semantic complexity and increasing syntactic complexity. However, he also emphasizes that the increased complexity raises problems for how to define clause structure in many contextualized ASL utterances. Shaffer investigates the polysemy network associated with the sign glossed BORING. She traces phonological variations on the sign and the concomitant changes in interpretation. Variants whose interpretation is more closely associated with the experience of being bored are signed close to the nose. Those that take on discourse marker functions (and are, hence, semantically more abstract and conceptually distant from the central meaning) are signed in neutral space. She concludes that physical distance from the body corresponds to conceptual distances from the source meaning. Hogue et al discuss two nouns classes found in ASL that illustrate the constructs of bounded and unbounded entities and their relation to mass and count nouns. The authors offer evidence for the perceptual and cognitive motivation underlying linguistic structure.

Discourse and Corpus Considerations

Sweetser gives an innovative account of the importance of gesture in discourse structure marking. This work underscores the premises that speakers’ production of language cannot be understood apart from other cognitive, non-linguistic processes and that the full extent of these connections cannot be understood without taking a discourse perspective.

Gonzalez considers cross-linguistic variation in speakers’ use of pragmatic markers, particularly compound pragmatic markers (CPMs), to organize, recover, reformulate and segment the ongoing discourse. The data shows that speakers use CPMs to constrain possible inferences and presuppositions by connecting current propositions with preceding and following ones and simultaneously connecting the pragmatic discourse structure within which the CPMs are found to the rhetorical, sequential, and inferential components. He argues that, because of the grammaticalization process CPMs have gone through, many retain some traits belonging to the ideational structure, directly related to the ideas described in the text-world. Archard’s paper challenges the standard position that so-called unergative and unaccusative verbs can be accounted for by an analysis that relies on assigning these verbs a particular set of argument structures. Drawing on a corpus from French newspapers, he convincingly argues that the constructions themselves have meaning and that the verbs that occur in these constructions are limited to a small set whose semantics are compatible with the construction. Moder also emphasizes the importance of studying language in naturally occurring context; she demonstrates that a corpus-based examination of metaphors and similes shows that the two constructions serve different discourse functions.

Conceptual metaphor and blending

Dancygier analyzes multiple examples of pronoun use in narratives and finds that blending theory offers a cogent account of shifts in narrative viewpoint accomplished by shifts in pronoun usage. Refining conceptual metaphor theory, Grady presents a new constraint on metaphorical mapping which involves what he terms ‘superschema’, an even more generic structure than provided by Lakoff’s invariance principle in source-target mapping. Fujii applies conceptual blending theory to a range of joking phenomena.

 

Editor: Andrea Tyler, Professor and GURT 2003 organizer, Georgetown University. She has taught a range of courses which largely focus on applications of discourse analytic, pragmatic, and cognitive theories of language to issues in second language learning and teaching. She was the 1994 recipient of the TESOL-Newberry House Outstanding Researcher of the Year Award. She has published in numerous journals including Language, Journal of Pragmatics, TEXT, Studies in Second Language Acquisition and TESOL Quarterly. She is the co-author, with Dr. Vyvyan Evans, of the volume The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition (2003) published by Cambridge University Press.

Theoretical contribution

A number of fine volumes consider language and language learning from either a cognitive or a contextualized, discourse perspective, however, few combine both perspectives. The majority of the papers in this volume represent cognitive research that relies on naturally-occurring language gathered from large corpora or observational data, thus they provide an unusually strong contextualized, cognitive perspective. This volume offers an exciting set of new cognitive investigations that consider the context in which language is created, the specific purpose for which language is used, and how those factors affect the structure of language.

Audience

The audience for this book would be very similar to the audience and participants at GURT 2003. GURT has been meeting since 1948 and has a loyal following of scholars and teachers, who welcome exposure to a wide range of perspectives in language research. The conference proceedings have been published for many years and have an established place in most academic libraries in the US, as well as many in Latin America and Asia.

As for individuals who would be drawn to this collection, the theme would attract both researchers and language teaching practitioners. Cognitive linguists, particularly those interested in the relationship between language learning--either first or second--and the structure of language, will find many fresh ideas and new investigations by some of the leaders in the field. Cognitive linguists expressly concerned in making connections with researchers whose focus is more squarely in either discourse or second language learning would be attracted to the range of approaches and applications contained in the volume.

Finally, an important readership would include applied linguistics, SLA researchers, and second language teachers seeking to learn about cognitive linguistics. They would likely find the papers in the sections on first and second language learning of greatest interest, however, some of the more theoretical studies would also draw their attention. For instance, unaccusative and passive constructions have been of considerable interest to SLA researchers and second language teachers because second language learners often have difficulty with these constructions. So, native speakers of Korea and Japanese learning English frequently produce ungrammatical sentences such as “The accident was happened last night”. Archard’s study of French unaccusatives begins to offer an explanation for how these constructions might work in other languages, such as English, and provides a model for how to investigate the issue.

The publication of this set of papers is particularly timely for the field of second language acquisition. Leading researchers are emerging from a long period of narrow focus on mechanics of instructed language learning. These investigations have largely been divorced from any particular theory of language. Disillusioned with models that emphasize the modularity of language, examination of sentences in isolation, and data derived solely from individual introspection, the focus in the past 10 years has been on psychological processes involved in language learning, such as the importance of learner’s awareness of forms or the efficacy of implicit versus explicit methods of instructional presentation. Questions about the nature of language itself, the relation of language to cognition more generally, and how these might affect language learning have been largely ignored. However, recently, L2 researchers have begun to turn to cognitive linguistics as witnessed by the facts that Studies in Second Language Acquisition, one of the premiere journals in the field of second language learning, devoted an entire issue to frequency-based approaches to L2 and that one of the four invited colloquia at the 2003 annual convention of the America Association of Applied Linguists was on the theme ‘Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition’.

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