With reference to the psychological and pedagogical commitments of the LCM, this paper discusses and compares the verb-centered view and the construction-centered view in second language acquisition. It contributes to providing the notion of construction grammar with further psychological validity by showing (a) that we store in our mind higher-level argument configurations instantiated by lower-level configurations (e.g. verbal predicates and their associated arguments), and (b) that the ontological reality of argument structure configurations plays a relevant role not only in the mind of native speakers of English, but also in that of Italian learners of English, thus adding observations of typological nature which would inform the pedagogical practice. Taking the veil from Bencini & Goldberg’s experiment (2000), the paper reports on one sentence-sorting experiment of a series of experiments that the author is developing with a view to assessing a cline of "Constructional Complexity" in second language acquisition and to designing updated teaching materials.

The Ontological Status of Constructions in the Mind of Italian University Learners of English: Psycholinguistic Evidence from a Sentence-sorting Experiment

Baicchi Annalisa
2013-01-01

Abstract

With reference to the psychological and pedagogical commitments of the LCM, this paper discusses and compares the verb-centered view and the construction-centered view in second language acquisition. It contributes to providing the notion of construction grammar with further psychological validity by showing (a) that we store in our mind higher-level argument configurations instantiated by lower-level configurations (e.g. verbal predicates and their associated arguments), and (b) that the ontological reality of argument structure configurations plays a relevant role not only in the mind of native speakers of English, but also in that of Italian learners of English, thus adding observations of typological nature which would inform the pedagogical practice. Taking the veil from Bencini & Goldberg’s experiment (2000), the paper reports on one sentence-sorting experiment of a series of experiments that the author is developing with a view to assessing a cline of "Constructional Complexity" in second language acquisition and to designing updated teaching materials.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11567/982861
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