COGNITIVE-LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO SLA AND USAGE (original) (raw)

2024, Usage in Second Language Acquisition (Routledge)

Cognitive linguists have been interested in the relationship between linguistic description and language learning from the very beginning due to the very foundations of Cognitive Linguistics (CL). In Langacker’s usage-based model, knowledge of language emerges from usage, which refers to situated instances of comprehending and producing language. A significant contribution of CL to linguistic study is a detailed description of the cognitive processes that are at work in language and thought, which allow language speakers to extract language knowledge from usage events. Such cognitive processes operate across all areas of language and all levels of language acquisition, including but not limited to the process of entrenchment, the process of meaning construction, schematization, categorization, comparison (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, construal), and integration. Moreover, CL sees language as a product of physical interaction with the world mediated by human conceptualization. Thus, many aspects of language are conceptually motivated, amenable to instruction (explicit, implicit, or the combination of both). The linguistic motivation at various levels (i.e., form-form, form-meaning, meaning-meaning) has the potential to remove the arbitrariness from language teaching and bring about CL-inspired approaches to L2 instruction.