Highly polysemous verbs in a cross-linguistic and pedagogical perspective
(2007) Meeting of the Association Belge de Linguistique Appliquée (ABLA) — Location: Leuven (23.March.2007)
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- Abstract
- The study presented here examines highly polysemous verbs in a cross-linguistic perspective, on the basis of data from a multilingual translation corpus of English, French and Dutch (PLECI corpus). Using the notion of mutual translatability (Altenberg 1999), it shows that the sense of a highly polysemous verb which is most likely to be translated by its direct equivalent in the other language is the prototype (e.g. the sense of “handing” for the verb 'give'). Following Lado (1972: 283), who refers to “the most powerful factor in acquiring the vocabulary of a foreign language, namely, the vocabulary of the native language”, it will be argued that the prototypical sense should therefore be taught first to students, since it capitalises on the resemblance between the foreign language and the mother tongue. This contrastive evidence, furthermore, is supplemented by cognitive evidence, which demonstrates that the learning of a category is more effective when exposure is through a prototypical, rather than non-prototypical, member (see Mervis & Pani 1980). While such a position clearly runs counter to recent claims made by corpus linguists who insist on the most frequent usage in Foreign Language Teaching (the delexical sense in the case of highly polysemous verbs), it shows that “the enterprise of directly applying research to teaching, syllabus design or materials development is fraught with dangers and must proceed with caution” (Wong 1983: 161) and that monolingual corpora are not the only source to take into account when considering what should be taught to foreign learners.
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Gilquin, G. (2007). Highly polysemous verbs in a cross-linguistic and pedagogical perspective. Meeting of the Association Belge de Linguistique Appliquée (ABLA), Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225461