Causal constructions with an adjective in German and French: typological and pedagogical considerations
(2015) Journal of Social Sciences — Vol. 11, n° 3, p. 289-303 (2015)
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- Abstract
- The study explores the variety of causal constructions with an adjective in French and German, as they are realized in French "Pierre est rouge de colère" (‘Peter is red with anger’), German "Maria ist gelb vor Eifersucht" (‘Maria is yellow with jealousy’), French "Il est fou d’amour" (lit. ‘He is crazy of love’), French "Anne est morte de faim" (lit. ‘Anne is dead of hunger’). First, the different elements of the construction are described in detail in the framework of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar model (1995 and 2006) and of different phraseological studies (Burger 2007, Dobrovol‘skij 2011, Donalies 2009, and Fleischer 1997). As we see, one and the same syntactic structure can convey different meanings (also a non-causal meaning) with different degrees of idiomaticity, which leads us to classify the different examples as a continuum between Construction Grammar and Phraseology. In a contrastive approach, the study further highlights the typological differences in the causal construction between the Germanic language German and the Romance language French. These differences can lead to difficulties for French-speaking learners of German. The study proposes some teaching strategies to facilitate the learning of such causal constructions with an adjective. We will advocate a teaching methodology which privileges holistic sequences or so-called ‘chunks’ (Handwerker 2008) and which further focuses on the typological differences in the lexicalization patterns (e.g. different prepositions in German, different colour terms,…), but also on conceptual metaphor and metonymy (Barcelona 2001; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Niemeier 1998). This will help foreign learners to ‘rethink for speaking’ (Ellis and Cadierno 2009: 123) in the foreign language.
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De Knop, S. (2015). Causal constructions with an adjective in German and French: typological and pedagogical considerations. Journal of Social Sciences, 11(3), 289-303. https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2015.289.303 (Original work published 2015)