Sociocultural conceptualizations: Schemas, paraphrasing, and metaphorical transfer as metalinguistic learning strategies for French learners of German
(2006) LAUD Preprints — Vol. Series A, n° 644 (2006)
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- Whereas traditional foreign language teaching mainly concentrated on language as an object, that is, on the transmission of grammatical rules and lists of foreign vocabulary items, today’s modern language teaching rather concentrates on the language as a communication tool and aims for genuine and fluent communication in semi-authentic situations. Real-life situations are rooted in and follow from culture’s experiences in past and present life. This is the dimension in FLT that cognitive linguistics is relevant for. By its usage-based orientation and its being rooted in gestalt psychology and phenomenology, it offers a possibility of perceiving and describing the layer of sociocultural experience in a scientifically motivated way. On this cognitive view, extralinguistic reality is not an unstructured mass, but it is experientially structured as the result of coherent conceptualizations in diverse categories, each firmly based in larger domains of experience. Reality, that is the experience of reality, is organized by speakers of different languages in different categories: “We communicate the world as our language structures the phenomena of the world and categorises them as entities, processes, actions, space, time, etc. Consequently, our general cognitive ability, as far as categorisation functions are concerned, interacts with our linguistic ability.” (Dirven, 1989, p. 57) If we postulate a relationship between language and the categorization, which is a result of our conceptualization, then we can conclude that differences between languages reflect differences in the conceptualization (also see Taylor, 1993, p. 213). Categorization is not only or solely universal, but also and to a very large extent culturally specific, which means that more often than not it differs from one language to the other. This is particularly clear when we compare historically strongly related conceptualizations in the Romance languages with those in the Germanic languages. We will try to show this for three different domains, one in the verbal sphere, one in the nominal sphere, and one in case morphology.
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De Knop, S. (2006). Sociocultural conceptualizations: Schemas, paraphrasing, and metaphorical transfer as metalinguistic learning strategies for French learners of German. LAUD Preprints, Series A(644). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/206131 (Original work published 2006)