Prototypical equivalence and lexical learning
(2008) Third International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association — Location: Leipzig (25.September.2008)
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- Abstract
- Lexis is an important aspect of language learning. In fact, it has been claimed that to know a language is to know its vocabulary. While such a statement may not be completely accurate, it is still true that for learners of a foreign language to be able to communicate adequately, a “massive vocabulary expansion” (Kelly 1991: 257) is necessary. However, a number of pitfalls are associated with lexical learning. One of them has to do with the difficulty of establishing equivalences between words in the mother tongue (L1) and words in the target language (L2). For one thing, lexical equivalences between two languages are far from being perfect (see e.g. Van Roey 1990 for a comparison of French and English). For another, learners often establish incorrect equivalences, a case in point being the field of false friends, where confusion is created by the formal resemblance between semantically different words (cf. Granger & Swallow 1988). For applied purposes, the comparison of lexis in two languages has often relied on native data in the two languages, and especially, in recent years, on parallel corpora containing texts in one language and their translation, by expert translators, in the other language. The so-called Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996), for example, uses parallel corpus data in order to study the equivalence (or lack thereof) between two words or phrases cross-linguistically and thus make claims about transfer-related phenomena. Such an approach, however, neglects a crucial factor, namely the cognitive dimension of lexical learning. Following Kellerman (1977, 1979), it will be argued that the learner’s perception of the target language is an important issue to consider and that equivalences established in the learner’s mental lexicon are more informative than objective equivalences when it comes to the study of essentially cognitive phenomena such as transfer. These two measures, objective equivalence in the languages and subjective equivalence in the learner’s mental lexicon, will be compared to each other using parallel corpus data on the one hand and elicitation data on the other hand. While the corpus data will make it possible to determine the most frequent equivalent of a polysemous word in the other language, the elicitation data will give access to the equivalent perceived as the most prototypical one by learners, by asking them to give the first equivalent that comes to mind in their L1 when prompted for a L2 word (or the other way round). Using several case studies, it will be shown that prototypical equivalence may account for problems found in the learner’s production better than corpus data alone could.
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Gilquin, G. (2008). Prototypical equivalence and lexical learning. Third International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, Leipzig. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225449