Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Pedagogical Grammar文档.pdf

Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Pedagogical Grammar: The Case of Over Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans 1. Introduction Language learning is one of the most complicated feats that human beings accomplish. Any number of very real reasons exist as to why L2 learning presents tremendous challenges. However, instructed L2 learning has been further complicated by the fact that important elements of systematicity that exist in language have not been appropriately captured by the pedagogical grammars which underlie modern foreign language teaching textbooks and materials. For instance, lexical classes, such as English prepositions, are represented in the grammars (and the textbooks based on them) in piece- meal fashion. When students (and their teachers) encounter varying uses of these forms, the systematic relations between the multiple uses remain unexplained. For example, traditional analyses have not offered any expla- nations for why the four different meanings found in the sentences in (1a-d) are all associated with the form over: (1) a The picture is over the mantle b The teller at the central bank switched the account over to a local branch c The film is over d Arlington is over the river from Georgetown In sentence (1a) over is interpreted as roughly ‘located higher than’; in sen- tence (1b) over is interpreted as roughly ‘transferred’; in sentence (1c) over is interpreted as roughly ‘completed or finished’; and in sentence (1d) over is interpreted as roughly ‘on the other side of’. Such varying meanings are typically presented, if they are addressed at all, as an unorganized list of unrelated meanings that are accidentally coded by the same phonological form. This results in a fragmented picture of the lexical class, leaving the learner with the impression that the various uses are arbitrary. Indeed, learn- ers of English as a second language and many teachers of ESL have noted that ac