Construction-based teaching of German verbless directives to Italian and French-speaking learners
(2018) CALPIII, Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy, University of Texas, Austin — Location: University of Texas, Austin (15.February.2018)
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- As a satellite-framed language (Talmy 2000) German favors the expression of the motion path with so-called satellites. Therefore it does not surprise that short verbless constructions consisting only of a directional prepositional phrase are common in German, e.g. (1) Ab ins Bett! (lit. ‘Off into the bed!’) or (2) Rauf auf den Berg! (lit. ‘Up onto the mountain!’). With a collection of examples from comic strips in German, French and Italian (Hergé 1947, 1998, 1999; Jacobs 1980, 1991, 1993) the study first describes the semantic, pragmatic (illocutionary potential), syntactic and morpho-syntactic (German cases) constraints of such ‘verb-free’ examples (compare Jacobs (2008) and Wilder (2008)) in Goldberg’s (1995; 2006) Construction Grammar model. This description is compared with a traditional approach (see Jacobs 1980 and Müller 2010). For Italian and French-speaking learners of German, verbless directives constitute a challenge. Because Romance languages express the path of motion mainly with full verbs, learners tend to use a full verb also in German, which does not necessarily reflect the authentic expressions of motion. We propose a teaching methodology based on abstract constructions, structural priming (Gries 2005; Loebell & Bock 2003) and the embodied representation of the verbless directive constructions with pictures. The efficiency of this methodology was tested with picture-depicting tests designed for Italian and French-speaking master students in translation studies (proficiency level B2+/C1). Literature Goldberg, Adele (1995), Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gries, Stefan Th. (2005), Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34(4): 365-399. Jacobs, Joachim (2008), Wozu Konstruktionen? Linguistische Berichte 213: 3-44. Loebell, Helga & Kathryn Bock (2003), Structural priming across languages. Linguistics 41(5): 791-824. Müller, Gereon (2010), Regeln oder Konstruktionen? Von verblosen Direktiven zur sequentiellen Nominalreduplikation. In Stefan Engelberg, Anke Holler & Kristel Proost (eds.), Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik, 211-249. Berlin: de Gruyter. Talmy, Len (2000), Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilder, Christopher (2008), The PP-with-DP construction. In Witkos, Jacek & Gisbert Fanselow (eds.), Elements of Slavic and Germanic Grammars: A Comparative View. Papers on Topical Issues in Syntax and Morphosyntax, 235-253. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Data Hergé (1947/1982), Les aventures de Tintin - Le Crabe aux pinces d'or. Tournai: Casterman. Hergé (1998), Tim und Struppi – Die Krabbe mit den goldenen Scheren. Hamburg: Carlsen Verlag. Hergé (1999). Le avventure di Tintin. Il granchio d‘oro. Roma Lizaed. Jacobs, Edgar P. (1980). Die Abenteuer von Blake und Mortimer. Die Diamanten-Affäre. Hamburg: Carlsen Verlag. Jacobs, Edgar P. (1991). Les aventures de Blake et Mortimer – L'affaire du collier. Bruxelles: Editions Blake et Mortimer. Jacobs, Edgar P. (1993). Blake e Mortimer. Il caso del collier. Milano: Colori.
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De Knop, S., & Fabio Mollica. (2018). Construction-based teaching of German verbless directives to Italian and French-speaking learners. CALPIII, Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy, University of Texas, Austin, University of Texas, Austin. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/174042