İDB 426

Different ways of conceptualising of a scene

It affects grammar of language and accounts for why we select one form over another form

Uçak arabaların üstünde.Arabalar uçağın altında.

Construal operations often determine our selection of lexis and grammar

Attention/salience: selection, scope, scalar adjustment, dynamic attention

Judgment/comparison: categorisation, metaphor, figure, ground

Perspective/situatedness: viewpoint, deixis, subjectivity, objectivity

Constitution/gestalt: including most other image schemas

Structural schematisation: force dynamics: relationality

Construal operations are relevant to how we grasp the language itself. A language, as an auditory or visual phenomenon, is conceptualised as part of the reality of which we are trying to make sense. E.g., Cantonese word for ‘left’ and English word ‘jaw’

Conceptualisation of target language itself. E.g., inflectional morphology. Teaching the plural morpheme

Lexical-grammatical continuum: Teaching the meaning of derivational morphemes. ‘-er’, ‘-ee’

Attention/salience

Interpreting a form by its function or a product by a producer

We call a car ‘a nice set of wheels’ because we make a selection, singling out ‘wheels’ as that vehicle’s most salient aspect.

A process that enters into the grammar.

They played lots of Mozart. (product-for-producer)

We attend to what they produce over and above who they are. This shift in attention and salience changes our grammatical interpretation of a word, causing us to debound Mozart or to treat him as a substance lacking linear definition, as opposed to a person with a bounded form (Croft and Cruse 2004: 50–1).

Gibbs (1994) and Lakoff (1987): descriptive language depends on metonymy by selecting a few essential elements in a scene to evoke the larger whole. We also use metonymy and metaphor together to select the key elements in a scene.

“Activity : The room” provides a more straightforward series of metonyms from which lower-level students can start to build a descriptive discourse.

• Narrow the scope of attention• Forcing students to build a large vocabulary within the knowledge frames of words that the text provides

Lakoff (1987) notes how we may zoom in and out of a scene. Thus when seeing a herd of cows we may simply see a herd or can zoom into an individual animal. Our language, by offering collective terms (herd) or pluralised but individuated entities (cows), reflects these differing modes of construal. Often we use the collective category (herd) to confine our scope of attention to its parts (cows).

Encourage students to construct descriptive passages that narrow their scope of attention, building vocabulary and its associated knowledge frames as they do so.

Scope of attention can be expressed by syntax and in English it posits an iconic order where our narrowing of the focus matches the order in which items are presented.

Understanding scope of attention may help students • to construct sentences that are grammatically and lexically appropriate, • reinforcing how we use determiners to ground nouns and narrow their scope of attention, • then to modify them with relative clauses that elaborate upon the nature of this narrowed ground.

They can then extend these sentences into a larger chain of discourse.

We change what we attend to in a scene. (Talmy 1983: 238)

(39) He ran across the field (40) She ran through the field

(39) ‘the field’ in its entirety (40) it as an entity that the subject is working through, yard by yard, and which can therefore impede progress

How the scene is construed(39) offering a bird’s-eye view (40) an action more in close-up

Understanding how abstract relations derive from spatial ones can help students see the use of English prepositions as being more principled than may at first seem the case. The process of scalar adjustment can be used to make this clearer.

(41)They walked through many towns and villages (42) They worked through the problem in detail(43) They went through the text line by line (44) They thought through every possibility

(45) The bird flew over the field (46) They skipped over the text (47) They went over the plan in detail (48) They thought over their future

Sentences (41) and (45) encode a scalar adjustment through a literal expression of space. Sentence (41) closes up on the scene suggesting that the ‘towns and villages’ mark, or even impede, the subject’s unfolding progress. Sentence (45) perceives its trajectory as a complete entity. Space becomes our movement’s enduring consequence.

In examples (46–48), this concept of achieved movement is transferred into an abstract domain. The work, whether detailed or not, is framed as complete. In sentences (42–44) we retain a sense of an unfolding progression through that work, and of the work as something of an impediment to progress. This is why the expressions with ‘over’ retain the sense of a ‘review’, as of something already observed in its entirety, whilst expressions with ‘through’ tend to capture the sense of an effort subject to implementation.

Dynamic attention derives from how the movement of an object in a scene makes it salient. In language, we may construct imagery from this process by perceiving the static as mobile in order to draw together the attributes of scene. For example, we say that ‘the road climbed the pass’.

Dynamic attention is a common property of descriptive discourse, perceiving one feature as if in movement so that it stitches together the other mentioned items in the scene.

Encouraging students for the development of descriptive language; direction-giving

Chain stories focusing on a journey From linguistic manipulation of

imagined landscape to abstract ideas used in the organization of discourse Activity: The open road‘The road runs down bank turns to the left

then passes over a narrow bridge’

The Open RoadThe students write a short paragraph discussing the emergence of the concept they have put forward. They should first state what it is, then discuss how it evolved. They could use expressions such as the following:

The idea began as . . ... It was developed by (the suggestion that) It evolved into.............. when It was extended to include............ Finally it reached the current form when . . ..

Each group should explain their idea.

SCALAR ADJUSTMENT

The process of scalar adjustment shapes the grammar by

differentiating the way verbs and nouns may grasp an event.

Thus the verb ‘fell’ in sentence (49) suggests sequential scanning

because it conveys a dynamic scene that unfolded episodically

before the observer’s eyes. The noun ‘fall’ in example (50) captures

the event as if from high above, perceiving the boundaries of its end

and beginning.

(49) The king fell from power

(50) The fall of the King from power

(51) The fall of the King from power plunged the country into chaos

The perception of an event as bounded and complete therefore

allows us to see it as a phenomenon that can itself initiate other

actions, as in sentence (51). Our ability to perceive phenomena as

dynamic, and others as static thus enters into the grammar as one of

its most fundamental differences.

Judgment and Comparison

Different languages do not operate with

exactly the same categories. Eleanor Rosch (1975; 1978):

prototypical memberDifficulty with Rosch’s theory is that it still did not

account for the types of meaning that seem to stretch categories to breaking point. Also, she did not really tackle the question of how we form categories out of abstract entities when there is no observable prototype.

Lakoff (1987) Radial Category Model

A set of meanings organised around a best example but postulated different types of relationship between this prototype and the other category members. Like Rosch, he also emphasised that the category boundaries were fuzzy, with one meaning merging into another. Thus category members could be metaphorically or metonymically extended from the central member, even until they became members of other categories. Because one member could be a metaphorical extension of one that was not necessarily a prototype, this meant that the category could include members which bore almost no apparent relationship to each other.

Balan (Dybrial): women, fire, dangerous things, birds that are not dangerous, as well as exceptional animals, such as the platypus, bandicoot, and echidna.

Produce texts that focus less on immediate communicative need and more

upon the linkage of a given set of lexical items to a category. Such texts will

be familiar to those who have used topic-based methods and materials. For

example, consider the English concept of ‘a building’.

Hyponyms of the larger category, with a hyponym being the relationship between two words where the meaning of one is contained in the other. Thus zebras, horses and tigers are hyponyms of a ‘mammal’ category which is in turn a hyponym of ‘animal’. Teachers can use hyponym charts to explore category relationships and ask students to engage with a text structured by hyponymy.

Metaphors posit different modes of construal. For example,

sentences (52) and (53) show how time is construed

differently as ground to be covered and as a moving

object:

(52) They lived in a far-off time

(53) Time passed quickly

Metaphor is also bound up in several other construal

operations such as categorisation or dynamic attention.

Metaphor analysis (Low 1999): the occurrence of metaphor in spoken and written discourse is analysed to show the systematic nature of the speaker’s or writer’s attitudes towards their topic and the cultural values that these display; • the differentiation of first language and target language content; • to create analogues that help explore and explain target language content; • to foster the cognitive organisation, retention and and correct production of second language grammar and lexis.

Applied linguists have used metaphor analysis to look at how teachers and

learners conceptualise their task or arrange their broader approach (see for

example, Block 1997; Cortazzi and Jin 1999; Oxford et al. 1998; De

Guerrero and Villamil 2002). Block (1992) explored how teachers and

learners used different metaphors to construe the language

learning task, implying that the teachers’ approach may not be

fully grasped by the students.

They found four conceptual metaphors that they expressed as ‘the teacher as doctor’, ‘the teacher as a conduit (for information)’, ‘the teacher as a learning partner’, and ‘the teacher as nurturer’. These metaphors were analysed for their expression of broader social attitudes. For example, ‘the teacher as nurturer’ was identified with a broader understanding of the organic nature of learning and its association with a larger process of social growth.

Low’s (1988) notion of ‘a metaphorical competence’ : ‘metaphoric competence’ into such features as being able to ‘construct plausible meanings’ with metaphor, or to differentiate between new metaphors and conventionalised or dead ones.

The metaphoric competence model may be helpful for how it identifies the types of problem that metaphors pose to learners, however. In this respect it predicts metaphor-based activities that help students grasp the differences between their target language and their L1. Understanding such differences can help students towards a greater knowledge and hence control of the target language meanings themselves.

The use of analogues in language classes is probably also common. For example, teachers and text books make use of time-lines to illustrate tense structure. The situational approach also depends upon the capacity of the student to deal in analogy. Thus in a situation, people tell the police what they were doing when the bomb went off, to show how a tense, the past continuous, can express interrupted time. In a communicative method, the situation may be disguised as a communicative function. For example, the past continuous is an ‘expression of failed intentions’ in such sentences as ‘I was hoping to see you but you were out’. No matter how the situation is disguised, learners must use a sense of analogy to make these situational approaches work for them. To avoid the sense that the meaning of a structure is wedded to a given context, students must search for an analogous context where the structure can be used.

Holme (2004) : Meaning of grammatical item –ing morpheme.

Illustrating this as a trapped and recurring action whose dimensions are defined by the space that the speaker occupies.

The morpheme is detached from the verb to expose how it carries meaning, and bounds the verb meaning as a recurring action rooted in real-world events. The appropriate form of ‘be’ is treated as situating the subject inside the action.

Lindstromberg (1991) and Dudley-Evans and St John (1998): discipline- or register-specific conceptual metaphors to help students group the sub-technical lexis that might be useful to a particular discipline.

Boers (2000) helped students to explore how metaphors might shape an author’s attitude towards a particular topic in economic texts.

Metaphor has also been found to help with general vocabulary retention. Boers (2004) found that grouping new vocabulary around the conceptual metaphors from which it had been derived would also help students improve their uptake of the same. A central strategy to take forward is that of teaching metaphorical expressions by exploring their literal roots.

Metaphor as an organisational role in discourse was exploited by Holme (2004) and Holme and King (2000). In a series of classroom interventions they used conceptual metaphors to help students develop cohesion in types of paragraph writing that were useful for students of English for Academic Purposes. Thus the conceptual metaphors, ‘knowledge is sight’, and ‘writing is thinking’ were used to underpin the meta-textual part of the introduction to a student essay. Accordingly, student writers told the reader about what they would ‘survey’, ‘look at in detail’, ‘elucidate’, ‘view from different perspectives’, then ‘come to see’, or examine ‘from a different point of view’.