28.1032, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; Lang Acquisition; Ling Theories: De Knop, Gilquin (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1032. Tue Feb 28 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1032, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; Lang Acquisition; Ling Theories: De Knop, Gilquin (2016)

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Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 12:37:33
From: James Garner [james.r.garner at gmail.com]
Subject: Applied Construction Grammar

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2225.html

EDITOR: Sabine  De Knop
EDITOR: Gaëtanelle  Gilquin
TITLE: Applied Construction Grammar
SERIES TITLE: Applications of Cognitive Linguistics
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: James Robert Garner, Georgia State University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The past decade has seen a great increase in the amount of linguistic research
undertaken from a Construction Grammar (CxG) framework. While CxG covers a
wide range of theoretical models, the central tenet of all of them holds that
language is a collection of form-meaning mappings (constructions) that range
in size from single morphemes to complex verb-argument constructions (i.e. the
ditransitive, the prepositional dative, the caused motion construction).
Despite the growing popularity of this model of language, CxG studies so far
have largely been either theoretical or descriptive in nature. They have
compared CxG with other linguistic theories, focused on describing specific
constructions (e.g. the ditransitive), or described how CxG principles are
realized across languages. In comparison, research taking a CxG approach to
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogy remains
relatively rare. It is this gap in the literature that Sabine De Knop and
Gaëtanelle Gilquin address with their edited volume, “Applied Construction
Grammar”. In this volume, De Knop and Gilquin have brought together twelve
chapters divided over three sections focusing on how CxG can be applied to
specific issues in SLA and foreign language learning and teaching. The
chapters in Part One  of the volume examine how constructionist approaches can
be used to enhance foreign language pedagogy. Part Two investigate the
influence, both positive and negative, that L1 constructions may have on the
learning of an L2. The last section of the volume includes chapters that
address ways for building learners’ inventories of L2 constructions. 

Preceding the main body of the volume is an introduction written by the
editors that lays the foundation for the rest of the volume. It begins with
brief introduction to the main tenets of CxG and a review of the few CxG
studies addressing L2 acquisition. According to the editors, these previous
studies could be divided into two broad groups. The first group includes
studies investigating, either through psycholinguistic or corpus-based
methods, the existence of constructions in L2 varieties of English. Example
studies reviewed in this section include Ellis and Ferreira-Junior (2009), and
Ellis, O’Donnell, and Römer (2014), Gries & Wulff (2005, 2009), and Liang
(2002). These studies have shown not only that constructions exist in L2, but
that they can also influence L2 acquisition. The second group of studies
includes Holme (2010) and Wee (2007) and focuses on how insights from
constructionist approaches can be used to enhance language pedagogy. For
example, Holme (2010) emphasizes teaching approaches that encourage students
to generalize knowledge of constructions through repeated exposure to various
instantiations of it in real contexts. While the editors make it clear that
all of the reviewed studies have made valuable contributions to our
understanding of L2 constructions and their acquisition, they also point out
that these studies are still few in number and limited in their overall scope.
The second half of the introduction, in typical fashion for introduction
chapters, briefly presents the chapters that will follow in the volume.
However, unlike most introductions, the editors do not present each chapter in
order, but rather according to major themes that cut across chapters and
sections. These themes include the nature of L2 constructions, transfer of L1
constructions into L2, constructionist views towards L2 acquisition, and
CxG-inspired teaching strategies. 

Part one of the main body of the volume, “Constructionist approaches to L2
learning and teaching”, begins with a chapter by Thomas Herbst in which he
highlights the benefits CxG and usage-based approaches can have for foreign
language teaching. Through the presentation of four common topics in grammar
instruction, he highlights some problematic issues that plague current grammar
teaching methods. These include an overreliance on grammatical terms that
poorly reflect the current state of English grammar, the sometime unsystematic
approach to grammar teaching, and the inconsistency with which the functions
of formal linguistic units are identified. Following a quick review of the key
tenets of CxG, Herbst then shows how shifting the focus to constructions can
alleviate these problems. For example, Herbst claims that by focusing on the
will-construction and the going to-construction rather than the “future
tense”, confusing and unnecessary terminology can be avoided. Herbst ends his
chapter by proposing seven principles of what he calls “Pedagogical
Construction Grammar”. These principles include the principle of presenting
constructions as form-meaning pairs, the principle of indicating chunks, and
the principle of authenticity. While none of his proposed principles are
revolutionary, they do indicate the significant benefits some of the basic
ideas of CxG can have for foreign language learners. 

Chapter three of the volume is written by Sabine De Knop and Fabio Mollica and
shows how the concepts of verb valency and constructions can help L2 German
learners acquire ditransitive phraseologisms. Specifically, the authors focus
on whether the knowledge of ditransitive constructions can be generalized to
ditransitive idioms and the benefits this may have for the acquisition of
these items. Following a review of the literature on ditransitive
constructions and verb valency, the authors present three experiments aimed at
providing evidence for the connection between ditransitive constructions and
ditransitive idioms. The experiments include a sorting task, a multiple-choice
meaning guessing task, and a guess the meaning in context task. The results
for both the L1 Belgian-French and L1 Italian learners indicated that L2
German learners not only classified ditransitive idioms according to the
construction, but they can also guess the meaning of the idioms based on their
knowledge of the ditransitive construction. The chapter concludes with
suggestions for teaching approaches that start with the prototypical,
non-idiomatic use of a construction and then expands to covering idiomatic
uses of the construction. 

In their chapter, Min-Chang Sung and Hyun-Kwon Yang compare the effects of
construction-based and form-based instruction on the learning of the
transitive resultative construction. In addition, the authors investigated the
effects of the two instruction methods on other constructions that exists in
the same network as the transitive resultative, such as the caused motion and
intransitive motion constructions). The subjects of their study included four
groups of L1 Korean middle school and high school students. Two groups
received construction-based instruction that focused student attention towards
construction as the determiner of the meaning of the sentence. The other two
groups received form-based instructions that drew student attention to the
sentence as a structural unit consisting of a verb and its arguments. The pre-
and post-tests consisted of two translation tasks, one that asked students to
translate Korean sentences to their English equivalents and one that asked
students to do the opposite (English to Korean translation). The results
showed that, while both groups improved in their ability to translate
transitive resultative constructions, the group receiving construction-focused
instruction showed greater improvement. The results also showed that
instruction focusing on one construction can have positive effects on the
learning of other related constructions, given that the other constructions
are less marked and directly related to the target construction. 

The final chapter of part one, written by Gaëtanelle Gilquin, compares the
acquisition of the periphrastic causative construction (e.g. X cause Y
Vto-inf) by ESL and EFL students. Based on the concept of input-dependent
language acquisition, the author hypothesizes that ESL learners, with their
increased exposure to English, will be better able to employ this construction
than their EFL counterparts. To test this hypothesis, she analyzed the use of
the periphrastic causative containing the verbs cause, get, have, and make in
EFL and ESL texts from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and
the NUS Corpus of Learner English (NUCLE). The reference corpus used in the
study comprised texts taken from the academic writing subsection of the
British National Corpus (BNC). In regard to frequency of the causative
constructions in the three corpora, the results showed that both ESL and EFL
students overused these constructions, although the EFL students showed a
greater degree of overuse. The syntactic analysis revealed a more mixed
pattern. While ESL students were closer to native speakers in their use of
constructions with ‘cause’, EFL students better approximated native speakers
in terms of their use of constructions with ‘make’. The results for the
phraseological analysis, which employed distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries
& Stefanowitsch, 2004), indicated that the ESL writers were closer to the
native speakers than the EFL students in their choice of verbs in the
non-finite verb slot. Nevertheless, evidence of overuse of high-frequency and
general-purpose verbs by both groups of learners was found. Taken together,
these results lead Gilquin to propose three refinements to the input-dependent
acquisition hypothesis. First, she claims that not all aspects of a
construction benefit from the same kinds of input in an equal fashion. Second,
future studies of input-dependent acquisition should include amount of formal
instruction as a variable in the model. Lastly, future analyses should take
individual variation into account, as some students will benefit from
naturalistic or enhanced input more or less than other students. 

Part two of the main body of the volume, titled “Crosslinguistic Applications
of Constructional Approaches”, begins with a chapter by Francisco José Ruiz de
Mendoza Ibáñez and María de Pilar Agustín Llach that proposes a blending of
Cognitive Grammar and Pedagogical Grammar into Cognitive Pedagogical Grammar
(CPG). Their model of CPG entails carrying out Cognitive Linguistic analysis
on similar constructions in two languages and looking for similarities and
differences that can cause difficulties for learners. Based on this work, the
next step would involve drawing pedagogical implications that can lead to
teaching strategies within a usage-based teaching framework. In order to
illustrate their model, the authors explore similarities and differences in
how Spanish and English rely on figurative language, constructions, or a
combination of the two to derive meaning. Based on their cross-linguistic
analysis, the authors then propose two implications for the teaching of
English to native Spanish speakers. First, teaching strategies need to be
devised for figurative language that has strong a lexical or constructional
grounding that differs from L1 to L2. Second, the authors suggest that
constructions that are similar in their conceptual and formal structure be
taught in relation to each other. These implications are expanded upon in two
concrete pedagogical examples as well as a detailed description of how they
could be implemented in a sequence of classroom activities.

In their chapter, Alberto Hijazo-Gascón, Teresa Cadierno, and Iraide
Ibarretxe-Antuñano explore the differences between Danish and Spanish
placement caused motion constructions, with special focus on the effect these
differences may have for L1 Danish learners of Spanish. The authors choose to
focus on this construction because Spanish and Danish differ in how they
encode Path in motion constructions. Spanish, a verb-framed language, encodes
Path in the verb, while Danish, a satellite-frame language, encodes Path
outside of the verb. According to the authors, L1 Danish learners of Spanish
might have difficulty expressing caused motion in their L2 due to their
experience with their L1. In order to investigate this possibility, the
authors undertook a small-scale study comparing how monolingual Danish, Danish
L2 speakers of Spanish, and monolingual Spanish speakers described caused
motion events shown to them in short video clips. The videos varied in the
nature of the movement and configuration of objects, the tools used to move
objects, and the manner in which they were moved. Results showed that while
the L2 Danish speakers were able to use the Spanish caused motion
construction, they were unaware of some of the preferred verbs and semantic
categories for this construction. For instance, the L2 Spanish subjects over
relied on a single general verb (poner, “put”) and seemed unaware of how
support, containment, and intentionality are expressed in this construction.
Based on these findings, the authors claim that pedagogical focus should be
given to the different nuances of the construction once its general pattern
has been acquired. Teaching strategies suggested by the authors included
spot-the-difference and Total Physical Response tasks that highlight the
various placement events that can be encoded in the construction. 

In her chapter, Annalisa Baicchi investigates the priming of constructions for
intermediate learners of English. In doing so, she aims to provide further
empirical support for the notion that constructions can offer an alternative
to the debate between the form-mapping and meaning-mapping approaches in
priming research. After presenting both approaches, she provides an in-depth
review of one study taking the form-mapping approach and one taking a
meaning-mapping approach. These studies serve as the basis for Baicchi’s
experiment. In her experiment, two groups of intermediate L1 Italian
university learners of English were primed to produce three different
sentences describing transfer (double-object, dative, fulfilling). The two
groups of subjects corresponded to the B1 and B2 proficiency levels on the
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe,
2001). The results indicated that subjects in both groups produced the
double-object construction, a construction found in English but not in
Italian. In addition, subjects in the B2 produced the double-object
construction more than the B1 subjects and more than the dative construction,
the prototypical Italian transfer construction. According to Baicchi, these
results indicate that not only do learners possess constructions in their
interlanguage, but also that with increasing proficiency learners can more
easily utilize these constructions. 

Part two of the main body of the volume ends with a chapter by Paolo Della
Putta in which the author explores the unlearning of constructions in order to
avoid transfer issues in L2. The specific constructions under investigation in
this chapter were the Spanish planned future periphrasis, iterative
periphrasis, and their literal equivalents in Italian. While these
constructions share some similarities in both languages, subtle differences in
their functions may cause transfer issues for L1 Spanish learners of Italian.
To test this possibility, three groups of subjects completed a picture-based
task in which they were asked to complete dialogues discussing planned future
or iterative events. The three groups were comprised of L1 Spanish
non-instructed learners of Italian who had long-term exposure to Italian, L1
Spanish instructed learners of Italian with limited exposure to the target
language, and L1 speakers of Italian. The results indicated that, regardless
of exposure or instruction, both L1 Spanish groups performed poorly on the
task. These results lead Della Putta to conclude that learners would greatly
benefit from instruction that focuses on the unlearning of L1 constructions.
The author ends the chapter with specific pedagogical suggestions for
assisting learners in the unlearning of constructions. These suggestions
include transcodification activities, interactive strategies for noticing
ungrammaticality, and input manipulation that gives learners positive evidence
for L2 constructions. 

The third and final part of the volume, titled “Constructing a Constructicon
for L2 Learners” includes three chapters that present different approaches to
help learners build their inventory of constructions in L2. The first chapter
of this part, written by Bert Cappelle and Natalia Grabar, describes how
n-gram extraction can be employed in the creation of an n-grammar for use in
the language classroom. According to the authors, an n-grammar consists of the
most frequent structural strings found in a large reference corpus, in the
case of this study the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies,
2009). In order to create their list, the authors first downloaded lists of
the most frequent lexical 5-grams (contiguous sequences of five words) with
their part-of-speech information from the COCA website. Then, the sequences
were grouped according to their part-of-speech sequences. For example, the
5-grams ‘the rest of the world’ and ‘the end of the day’ would be classified
into the same syntactic 5-gram, the Xnoun of the Ynoun. The syntactic 5-grams
were then placed into a frequency list based on their type frequency (i.e.
number of different lexical 5-grams). Lastly, the 100 most frequent syntactic
5-grams were included in the authors’ n-grammar. In addition to providing a
detailed explanation of their approach, the authors also spend significant
time addressing possible criticisms as well as further developments of their
approach for implementation in the language classroom. 

In their chapter, Hans C. Boas, Ryan Dux, and Alexander Ziem introduce a newly
created resource for helping L1 English students learning German, the German
Frame-Based Online Lexicon (G-FOL). Highlighting the shortcomings of
traditional resources in presenting both lexical and syntactic information to
learners, the authors show how an online resource based on Frame Semantics and
the lexical database FrameNet can address these shortcomings. They then lead
the reader through the creation of G-FOL and present example entries focusing
on grooming verbs in German. The authors highlight how the features of these
entries can help L1 English speakers learn the subtle differences in grooming
verbs between German and English. Although G-FOL does not currently contain
constructions, the authors do present ways in which they may be added in the
future. 

The final chapter of the volume, written by Lisa Loenheim, Benjamin Lyngfelt,
Joel Olofsson, Julia Prentice, and Sofia Tingsell, discusses the current
shortcomings in second language pedagogy as they pertain to construction
learning and presents an electronic resource for addressing such shortcomings.
The chapter begins with a review of four textbooks widely used in L2 Swedish
classrooms, with attention paid to their treatment of constructions. Through
their review, the authors find that all four textbooks fail to address the
productivity of constructions or the variability of formulaic language.
Following this textbook review, the authors present the Swedish constructicon
(SweCcn), an online database of Swedish constructions designed to assist in
the creation of teaching materials. They show the various ways in which
teachers can search for constructions in the database. For example,
constructions can be searched for based on their type (e.g. construction of
comparison, construction with verb particle), category (e.g. NP, VP), or
semantic frame (e.g. time, motion). The chapter ends with a discussion of the
advantages a constructional approach to language teaching may have for both
teachers and learners. 

EVALUATION

Overall, this volume, through its emphasis on the application of CxG insights
on language learning and teaching, makes a strong contribution to the CxG
field. The main strengths of the chapters in this volume, and the volume as a
whole, are the wide range of constructions and languages covered, the reliance
on empirical data, and the in-depth discussions of pedagogical implications.
The chapters in this volume address issues in constructional learning not only
for English, but also other languages such as German, Italian, Spanish, and
Swedish. In addition, a diverse range of L1 student backgrounds is also
addressed, further widening the coverage of the volume. A further strength of
the volume is the reliance on empirical data. Every claim was supported by
either psycholinguistic, corpus, or experimental data collected and analyzed
by the contributing researchers. Lastly, every chapter of the volume included
lengthy discussions of pedagogical implications, with some even including
sample activities and materials that teachers can adapt for their own
classrooms. Despite these strong points, the volume is not without its
limitations. The most obvious limitation is the lack of a chapter or chapter
section thoroughly introducing readers to some of the basic concepts in CxG.
In addition, several of the chapters assume that readers already know a great
deal about CxG or other relevant topics (i.e. verb valency). While this may
not be a limitation for more experienced practitioners, relative newcomers may
find some of the concepts more challenging to understand. Nevertheless, this
volume serves as a valuable resource for those interested in applying CxG
theories and principles to the challenges of language acquisition and language
pedagogy, a crucial step in the continuing growth of this field. 

REFERENCES

Davies, Mark. 2009. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million
words, 1990-present. Available online at: http://corpus/byu.edu/coca

Ellis, Nick C., & Ferreira-Junior, Fernando. 2009. Constructions and their
acquisition: Islands and the distinctiveness of their occupancy. Annual Review
of Applied Linguistics 7. 187-220.  

Ellis, Nick C., O'Donnell, Matthew B., & Römer, Ute. 2014. Second language
verb-argument constructions are sensitive to form, function, frequency,
contingency, and prototypicality. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 4(4).
405-431.

Gries, Stefan T. & Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004. Extending collostructional
analysis: A corpus-based perspective on “alternations”. International Journal
of Corpus Linguistics 9(1). 97-129.

Gries, Stefan T., & Wulff, Stefanie. 2005. Do foreign language learners also
have constructions? Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3. 182-200.

Gries, Stefan T., & Wulff, Stefanie. 2009. Psycholinguistic and
corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 7. 163-186. 

Holme, Randal. 2010. Construction grammars: Towards a pedagogical model. AILA
Review 23. 115-133.

Liang, Junying. 2002. How do Chinese EFL learners construct sentence meaning:
Verb-centered or construction based? M.A. thesis. Guangdong University of
Foreign Studies, Guangzhou.  

Wee, Lionel. 2007. Construction grammar and English language teaching.
Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching 3(1). 20-32.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

James Garner is currently a PhD student in the Department of Applied
Linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University. His current research
interests include Corpus Linguistics, Phraseology, and Usage-based Second
Language Acquisition.





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