Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven, Klaus-Uwe Panther, eds. 2003. Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (original) (raw)
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1 The Importance of Motivations in Language
2015
The revitalization of a language involves speakers making thousands of individual language choice decisions, with the pooled choices resulting in increased use of the language. Understanding individual language choice motivations is key to understanding and having some bearing on these individual language choice decisions. This paper first addresses the importance of motivations by providing a taxonomy with which to discuss and better understand language choice motivations. Back in 1985, John Edwards attributed language shift to “pragmatic decisions in which another variety is seen as more important for the future " (1985:71). Among his “pragmatic considerations ” are power, social access, and material advancement. He maintains that the only way to influence language shift (revitalize a language) is to alter the entire social fabric of the language community (1985:98).t This paper also addresses the importance of motivations in the sense of what leaders and members of a languag...
Сognitive Approaches to Teaching Language: Motivation of Lexical and Syntactical Constructions
2023
Introduction. Today, the indisputable influence and positive contribution of cognitive linguistics to foreign language teaching are determined by the "variety of presentation methods and differences between students, which can significantly affect the effectiveness of pedagogical methods" [5, p. 66]. The process of mental cognition, along with sociocultural and spatial experience, are embodied in language phenomena and, therefore, are integral aspects of language learning. Modern approaches to teaching a foreign language emphasize the inseparability of this process from such aspects of language acquisition as translation studies, cultural studies, psychology and cognitive approach [10]. Traditionally, foreign language classes are organized according to the student's needs and involve the mastery of professional terminology. However, in order to acquire vocabulary outside the classroom, given that the student is in an environment where the first language is used, there is a need to use additional educational techniques [6, p. 13]. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the process of learning a foreign language is different from other types of learning. For some reason, mastering a foreign language involves the development of an additional representational verbal system and the establishment of a connection between it and the general conceptual system that already exists in the native language. Cognitive-oriented teaching is designed to help students understand language more deeply, remember more words and phrases, and make connections between language and culture. Complementary to vocabulary retention will be a characteristic emphasis on mental associations based on experience and background knowledge [8]. F. Boers and S. Lindstromberg claim that such a complex approach to learning foreign vocabulary can contribute to the effective learning of words not only during the lesson, which is often limited by time frames, but also outside of it [6, p. 13]. And the cognitive interpretation of the linguistic phenomenon, as such, which is motivated, is designed to solve the problem of motivating the student to learn a foreign language inside and outside the educational environment [7, p. 211]. Z. Kövecses [15] emphasises that the theory of Cognitive Linguistics and the characterization of various language aspects proposed by it can be useful in teaching a foreign language, since they operate with the concept of motivated meaning: "the assumption concerning the potential usefulness of cognitive linguistics is predicated on the common belief that motivation always facilitates learning" [15]. Most of the research on conceptual motivation is focused on meaning-meaning connections, which are mainly traced in polysemantic and idiomatic expressions [6, p. 19]. The implementation of extra-linguistic motivation in the educational process consists of an attempt to familiarize the student with the basic or prototypical meaning of the word and to demonstrate the systematic expansion of the basic meaning to additional meanings through mental structures [25, p. 192]. Depending on the available time resource and level of perception, students can be offered to interpret such "chains of meaning" or simply point to them [6, p. 21]. In any case, such motivation will be effective for learning the meaning of lexical units, taking into account the semantic nature of extralinguistic motivation [6, p. 40]. Cognitive grammar examines the motivational relationship that exists between the meaning and form of linguistic constructions, considering their cognitive and communicative basis. Traditionally, in cognitive grammar, the concept of autonomy of language and syntax is rejected and, accordingly, the existence of clear boundaries between syntax and vocabulary is denied, and Філологічні дисципліни в закладі вищої освіти: лінгводидактичні аспекти Кам'янець-Подільський, 20.04.2023
Contemporary language motivation theory – 60 years since Gardner and Lambert (1959)
Hungarian Educational Research Journal
was published by Multilingual Matters in 2019. It is a valuable and diverse anthology of reminiscences given by outstanding scholars in relation to Gardner's seminal paper on 'Motivational variables in second language acquisition', which appeared in the 1959 edition of Canadian Journal of Psychology. The purpose of the book is to pay tribute to Gardner, the father of the socio-educational model by assessing the effect of his innovative theory on the scholarly world in a complex way and to demonstrate how this model has led to innumerable research ideas since its appearance in 1959. This successful book brings together leading scholars researching motivation on second language learning and acquisition from a wide range of fields such as social psychology, sociology, applied linguistics, historical and methodological issues as well as it provides the reader with a whole lot of new ideas for future exploration. Ali H. Al-Hoorie works as an assistant professor at the English Language Institute, Education Sector, Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia. As a PhD student his supervisors were Zolt an D€ ornyei and Norbert Schmitt at the University of Nottingham. His main research interests include motivation and research methodology.
Cognitive Linguistics: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical " prototype " of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.
Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage
Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, 2014
Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both prepositional and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation-Welshto investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-yearolds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.
Cognitive Processing, 2015
Fictive Motion (FM) characterizes the use of dynamic expressions to describe static scenes. This phenomenon is crucial in terms of cognitive motivations for language use; several explanations have been proposed to account for it, among which mental simulation (Talmy 2000) and visual scanning (Matlock 2004a). The aims of this paper are to test these competing explanations and identify language-specific constraints. To do this, we compared the linguistic strategies for expressing several types of static configurations in four languages, French, Italian, German and Serbian, with an experimental setup (59 participants). The experiment yielded significant differences for motion-affordance vs no motionaffordance, for all 4 languages. Significant differences between languages included mean frequency of FM expressions. In order to refine the picture, and more specifically to disentangle the respective roles of language-specific conventions and language-independent (i.e. possibly cognitive) motivations, we completed our study with a corpus approach (besides the four initial languages, we added English and Polish). The corpus study showed low frequency of FM across languages, but a higher frequency and translation ratio for some FM typesamong which those best accounted for by enactive perception. The importance of enactive perception could thus explain both the universality of FM and the fact that language-specific conventions appear mainly in very specific contexts-the ones furthest from enaction.
Cognitive Linguistics Today. Łódź Studies in Language. Frankfurt am
2016
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Ten Lectures on the Basics of Cognitive Grammar
Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics publishes the keynote lectures series given by prominent international scholars at the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics since 2004. Each volume contains the transcripts of 10 lectures under one theme given by an acknowledged expert on a subject and readers have access to the audio recordings of the lectures through links in the e-book and QR codes in the printed volume. This series provides a unique course on the broad subject of Cognitive Linguistics. Speakers include George Lakoff, Ronald Note on Supplementary Material All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material such as any handouts and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via a QR code for the print version of this book, in the e-book both the QR code and dynamic links will be available which can be accessed by a mouse-click. The material can be accessed on figshare.com through a PC internet browser or via mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. To listen to the audiorecording on hand-held devices, the QR code that appears at the beginning of each chapter should be scanned with a smart phone or tablet. A QR reader/ scanner and audio player should be installed on these devices. Alternatively, for the e-book version, one can simply click on the QR code provided to be redirected to the appropriate website. This book has been made with the intent that the book and the audio are both available and usable as separate entities. Both are complemented by the availability of the actual files of the presentations and material provided as handouts at the time these lectures have been given. All rights and permission remain with the authors of the respective works, the audio-recording and supplementary material are made available in Open Access via a CC-BY-NC license and are reproduced with kind permission from the authors. The recordings are courtesy of the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (http://cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/), funded by the Beihang University Grant for International Outstanding Scholars. The complete collection of lectures by Ronald W. Langacker can be accessed through scanning this QR code.