A construction-based study of German ditransitive phraseologisms for language pedagogy
(2013) Constructionist approaches to Language Pedagogy (Calp2013) — Location: l’Université Saint-Louis à Bruxelles (8.November.2013)
Files
CALP_Präsentation_DeKnopMollica.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 257.3 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Up to now the assets of Goldberg’s (1995 and 2006) Construction Grammar (CxG) with the concept of abstract constructions and the idea of a lexicon-syntax continuum have been extensively discussed from a more language-theoretical point of view (see among others Boas (2010), Fischer & Stefanowitsch (2007), Lasch & Ziem (2011), Stefanowitsch & Fischer (2008), Ziem & Lasch (2013)). The application of CxG-insights to language pedagogy has been more or less neglected (except for a few studies by Ellis & Ferreira-Junior (2009), Gries & Wulff (2005, 2009) and Valenzuela Manzanares & Rojo López (2008)). In teaching methodology for German as a foreign language (so-called DaF, Deutsch als Fremdsprache) it is still a valency-oriented presentation of grammar with a focus on the verb and the syntactic structures which are governed by this verb which prevails. German being a morphologically complex language, this is indeed a legitimate approach as the valency of the verb specifies the number and the form of the arguments governed by that verb (Herbst 2011). But a mere valency-based description is problematic when non-compositional structures are concerned, e.g. with ditransitive phraseologisms like (1) Max hat Luisa einen Korb gegeben (lit. ‘Max has given Luisa a basket’ = ‘Max has turned Luisa down’) or (2) Petra zeigt ihrem Bruder die Krallen (lit. ‘Petra shows her brother the claws’ = ‘Petra threatens her brother’). Valency theory relegates non-compositional phraseologisms to the lexicon with the consequence that they have to be learned by heart. This is not satisfactory from the point of view of efficient language pedagogy. The construction-based approach on the other hand makes it possible to describe the non-compositional examples of phraseologisms against the background of the schemas for prototypical ditransitive constructions, e.g. (3) Max gibt Luisa eine Rose (‘Max gives Luisa a rose’). The ditransitive constructions in (1)-(3) have the same syntactic form and express the idea of a transfer, but they differ from one another from the point of view of compositionality and in their degree of idiomaticity. Our presentation will first describe German ditransitive phraseologisms and compare them with corresponding Italian and French expressions. German being a so-called synthetic language (Siemund 2004), and Italian and French expressing grammatical relationships in a more analytic way, constructional differences can be expected. For instance, the German example (2) Petra zeigt ihrem Bruder die Krallen (lit. ‘Petra shows her brother the claws’) has a similar structure in French, i.e. Petra montre les griffes à son frère, but with a prepositional complement which results from the nominal character of the dative; the Italian translation differs in the lexeme selection and in the syntactic structure which is not ditransitive, i.e. tirar fuori unghie/artigli (lit. ‘to pull out the nails/claws’). We will further deal with pedagogical issues related to the learning of German ditransitive phraseologisms by French and Italian speakers. Inspired by tests conducted by Bencini & Goldberg (2000), but also by Valenzuela & Rojo (2008), we will present some further tests based on sorting tasks with Italian- and French-speaking learners of German. The tests make it possible to recognize whether learners sort ditransitive phraseologisms (i) in the same way as prototypical ditransitive constructions, or (ii) according to the valency of the verb, or finally (iii) according to their idiomatic meaning. From the results of the tests we can conclude that a construction-based teaching methodology which integrates the study of non-compositional phraseologisms within the larger frame of compositional and non-compositional schematic constructions should be enriched by valency properties typical of the German verbs (Stefanowitsch 2011 and Herbst 2011) and by the recognition of associations grounded in metaphor and/or metonymy. References Bencini, G. & A.E. Goldberg. 2000. The contribution of argument structure constructions to sentence meaning. Journal of Memory and Language 43: 640-651. Boas, H. 2010. Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ellis, N. & F. Ferreira-Junior. 2009. Constructions and their acquisition. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7: 187-220. Fischer, K. & A. Stefanowitsch. 2007. Konstruktionsgrammatik: Von der Anwendung zur Theorie. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Goldberg, A.E. 1995. Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, A.E. 2006. Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gries, S.Th. & S. Wulff. 2005. Do foreign language learners also have constructions? Evidence from priming, sorting, and corpora. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3: 182-200. Gries, S.Th. & S. Wulff. 2009. Psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7: 163-186. Herbst, Th. 2011. The status of generalizations. In Th. Herbst & A. Stefanowitsch (eds), Argument Structure – Valency and/or Constructions? ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 59(4): 347-367. Lasch, A. & A. Ziem (eds). 2011. Konstruktionsgrammatik III. Aktuelle Fragen und Lösungsansätze. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Siemund, P. 2004. Analytische und synthetische Tendenzen in der Entwicklung des Englischen. In U. Hinrichs (ed.), Die Europäischen Sprachen auf dem Weg zum analytischen Sprachtyp (pp. 169-196). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Stefanowitsch, A. 2011. Argument structure: Idem-based or distributed? In Th. Herbst & A. Stefanowitsch (eds), Argument Structure – Valency and/or Constructions? ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 59(4): 369-386. Stefanowitsch, A. & K. Fischer. 2008. Konstruktionsgrammatik II: Von der Konstruktion zur Grammatik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Valenzuela Manzanares, J. & A. María Rojo López. 2008. What can language learners tell us about constructions? In S. De Knop & T. De Rycker (eds), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar: A Volume in Honour of René Dirven (pp. 197-230). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ziem, A. & A. Lasch. 2013. Konstruktionsgrammatik: Konzepte und Grundlagen Gebrauchsbasierter Ansätze. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Affiliations
Citations
De Knop, S., & Mollica, F. (2013). A construction-based study of German ditransitive phraseologisms for language pedagogy. Constructionist approaches to Language Pedagogy (Calp2013), l’Université Saint-Louis à Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/190470