Abstract
The book provides a state-of-the field survey of what cognitive linguistics and construction grammar can contribute to the study of language acquisition and language teaching. Whether the setting is naturalistic or instructed, usage-based approaches assume that first, second – indeed all languages – are acquired by common cognitive and social processes. For example, transfer between languages recruits the same processes of analogy over form and function as those used within a language. To this extent, the account is parsimonious, requiring no extra theoretical add-ons to explain L1 and L2 development. In this review, I order the chapters according to the themes they discuss. Chapter 1 (Elena Tribushinina and Steven Gillis) introduces the standard usage-based model of language, namely a network of more or less abstract constructions organized by form and function. This is acquired by piecemeal learning of chunks that are decomposed and recombined by processes such as categorization and intention-reading. In Chapter 6 Maria Mos asks in what contexts people make use of more specific constructions and when they use more abstract ones. Over four developmental studies Mos shows how a model of morphological representations accounts for the acquisition and use of these constructions on the abstract-specific continuum. In doing so, the model broadly supports usage-based assumptions which underpin it.
Beyond the what and the how, concepts which are fundamental to usage-based theory include the frequency with which types and tokens are used, an utterance’s communicative function, conceptual complexity and saliency, and the interconnectivity between and within languages. There is also a commitment to looking at what people say in naturalistic discourse, including false starts, overlaps and incomplete sentences. Chapter 2 (Gaëtanelle Gilquin) follows up on this commitment with a corpus study investigating prototypicality and psychotypology in language transfer and the misuse of prepositional complements. Gilquin uses these two case studies to account for non-standard characteristics of second/foreign language use, arguing this approach can take us towards a more cognitive linguistics inspired pedagogy.
With the same obligation to study language in action, Chapter 3 (Barend Beekhuizen, Rens Bod and Arie Verhagen) aims to lift linguists off the page, highlighting the importance of analysing videotaped interactions. They focus on how children might learn the relational meaning of Dutch ‘in’ (meaning containment) and examine the word-to-world mapping available to the child when that construction is used. The environment is rich with potential cues to the construction’s meaning but there are a lot of noisy associations too. Some quantification of that noise, say through cross-situational modelling, could predict developmental outcomes, for example, age of acquisition. Chapter 7 (Elma Nap-Kolhoff) investigates whether the Dutch object-naming construction might be difficult for Turkish learners because the construction uses a copula (Turkish has no copula), and has a class of demonstrative pronouns unique to it (Turkish is much freer). A corpus analysis of 2- and 3-year-olds supports the idea that the second language is interpreted with respect to the first and that the cognitive learning styles become more explicit with age.
Within the corpus approach, several chapters explore learning chunks of language. Chunks are conventionalized, prefabricated word sequences expressing a certain concept. They are diagnostic of a more native-like repertoire, showing the fluency and authenticity of the speaker, yet are one of the greatest obstacles to L2 learners. Chapter 10 (Hana Gustafsson and Marjolijn Verspoor) provides a detailed account of the development of chunks in Dutch learners of English. In a longitudinal study they find high-input learners develop a wider range of chunk types, chunks are longer and more nested, and more likely to be contingent on the communicative needs of the context. Chapter 11 (Déogratias Nizonkiza) tests the productive knowledge of frequently co-occurring V+N combinations of English majors at the University of Burundi. Nizonkiza finds that controlled productive collocation knowledge develops in parallel with L2 proficiency. The chunking strategy is also important from a processing effort perspective. Learners approach L2 acquisition as more of an analytic exercise, trying to understand the individual words rather than the units, which is a cognitively exhausting strategy. It is argued that a deeper understanding of the parallels and differences in L1 and L2 collocations could lead to a more chunk-oriented syllabus.
Chapter 5 (Rasmus Steinkrauss) reminds us that there is a raft of factors that influence the course of development that go beyond frequency: previously learnt linguistic knowledge, communicative interest, and conditions of use of linguistic structures. Conceptual complexity is another. Chapter 8 (Anne Vermeer) asks when children start expressing relational coherence – using words like and, but, then, and because to express cause-consequence type relations. Previous research suggests that the increasing cognitive complexity of the relation predicts age of acquisition: additive precedes causal, positive precedes negative, and non-temporal precedes temporal. Vermeer shows evidence that this pattern holds cross-linguistically for L1 (Dutch) and L2 (mainly Turkish and Moroccan) in 93 children. Chapter 9 (Elena Tribushinina, Eva Valcheva and Natalia Gagarina) extends the work of Chapter 8 to consider the development of connectives in Russian–German bilinguals. The authors make some interesting predictions such that distributional properties of a dominant language may pre-empt relevant distinctions in a minority language. More specifically, the interaction of conceptual space between languages may predict the developmental course of bilingual connective use.
Another super-frequency effect is the semantic relatedness or transparency of items being learnt. Chapter 12 (Karen Sullivan and Javier Valenzuela) uses a distributional analysis of English and Spanish corpora to map out the conceptual space of similar words. The extent to which multiple meanings of the same lexical items cluster together in similar patterns across languages could help L2 learners identify where senses are similar and where they are different.
On a more methodological note, Chapter 4 (Huub van den Bergh and Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul) highlights important issues with longitudinal research, pointing to ways these can be controlled for and/or corrected. For example, the non-random attrition of participants over the course of the study will affect the representativeness of the sample and therefore generalizability. Bergh and Evers-Vermeul also advise caution when comparing samples with non-equal sampling density and encourage the use of a dense sample when analysing non-linear growth curves.
This edited volume is a useful addition for those interested in what usage-based theory has to say on the matter of acquiring language(s) and what that means for language teaching.
It may be taken as some sign of theoretical maturity that usage-based theory is now being applied to teaching, translation and a wide range of pedagogical settings. As Chapter 2 notes, ‘its effectiveness in language teaching [is regarded] to be an important empirical test for the framework’ (p. 50, citing Langacker, 2008, p. 8). There are of course many unresolved issues with the theory and it is natural that this book touches on some of those blind spots.
The focus on frequency effects raises the issue not only of ‘what to count’ but whether what we are counting is the same thing as what the learner counts. For example, the type-token distinction is not always clear when talking about hierarchies of abstraction; just as your mother is someone’s daughter, a type can be a token depending on the questions being asked. Add time-series to the analysis and type may become a token of something else (or vice versa) at different points in development – deciding what to count has implications for the validity and performance of the usage-based models.
The commitment to analyse naturalistic discourse that includes non-linguistic contextual information is very important. But of course, this type of analysis is also very labour-intensive: in Chapter 3, Beekhuizen notes a ratio of 37 minutes of coding time per one minute of video. Despite the need for more studies of this kind, we are unfortunately some way off automating this process as it relies on exactly the kind of human communicative intention-reading that the research itself is trying to understand.
For the theoretical maturity to continue, usage-based approaches must start to move to a position where the hypotheses are judged on their own merits – the extent to which they explain facts and predict novel findings – rather than doing a better job than Universal Grammar. This is understandable given the historical shadow Universal Grammar casts over linguistics, but if usage-based theory is to win over some critics, it needs to be careful about what the theory is and is not. For example, ‘since a leading claim of usage-based acquisition studies is that it is possible to learn language from the speech that children are exposed to’ (p. 27) is not an inaccurate statement, but every theory would have to say that, given that children do learn language. Claims of this sort need to be explicitly linked to a ‘what makes the difference’ argument, such as communicative intention-reading, which is mentioned elsewhere in the book.
Finally, the bi-directional nature of cognition and language that lies at the heart of the usage-based approach lends itself to correlational studies – linguistic capacity x is associated with cognitive capacity y. So, it is reasonable that many studies in this book take this form. As the theory develops, experimental manipulation to complement corpus studies and computational modelling will help move it further forward.