Frequency-based accounts of SLA

ion is possible unless it has a foundation in the form of some series of material elements, and these are the elements one must come back to finally” Frequency-based accounts of SLA p. 9 (Croft, 2001; Croft & Cruise, 2004; Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Langacker, 1987; Robinson & Ellis, 2008b; Tomasello, 2003; Tyler, this volume). The term phraseologism, more the currency of Corpus Linguistics, adds an additional statistical emphasis to its definition as the co-occurrence of a lexical item and one or more additional linguistic elements which functions as one semantic unit in a clause or sentence and whose frequency of cooccurrence is larger than expected on the basis of chance (Gries, 2008; Howarth, 1998). Goldberg’s (1995, 2003) Construction Grammar argues that all grammatical phenomena can be understood as learned pairings of form (from morphemes, words, idioms, to partially lexically filled and fully general phrasal patterns) and their associated semantic or discourse functions: “the network of constructions captures our grammatical knowledge in toto, i.e. It’s constructions all the way down” (Goldberg, 2006, p. 18). There are close relations here with Functional linguistic descriptions of the associations between particular lexico-grammatical patterns and their systemic functions (their propositional, interpersonal, and textual semantics) (Halliday, 1985; Langacker, 1987, 2000). Related developments with a typological perspective, Croft’s Radical Construction Grammar (2001; Croft & Cruise, 2004) reject the idea that syntactic categories and relations are universal and argue instead that they are both languageand construction-specific, being induced from particular local frequencies of usage of thought-sound relations. What are universal are the patterns of ways that meanings map onto form. 2 Remember Saussure’s “somewhat mysterious process by which ‘thought-sound’ evolves divisions, and a language takes place with its linguistic units in between these two amorphous masses. ” Frequency-based accounts of SLA p. 10 What of SLA? Language learners, L1 and L2 both, share the goal of understanding language and how it works. Since they achieve this based upon their experience of language usage, there are many commonalities between first and second language acquisition that can be understood from corpus analyses of input and cognitiveand psycholinguistic analyses of constructions acquisition following associative and cognitive principles of learning and categorization. Thus usage-based approaches, Cognitive Linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics are becoming increasingly influential in SLA research, too (Collins & Ellis, 2009; Ellis, 1998, 2003; Ellis & Cadierno, 2009; Robinson & Ellis, 2008b; Tyler, this volume), albeit with the twist that since L2 learners have previously devoted considerable resources to the estimation of the characteristics of another language -the native tongue in which they have considerable fluency -their computations and inductions are often affected by transfer, with L1-tuned expectations and selective attention (Ellis, 2006b) blinding the acquisition system to aspects of the L2 sample, thus biasing their estimation from naturalistic usage and producing the limited attainment typical of adult L2A. Thus SLA involves processes of construction and reconstruction. 3. Data (e.g., type) and common elicitation measures Understanding the mysterious process by which ‘thought-sound’ evolves divisions and a (second) language takes place with its linguistic units in between these two amorphous masses is a hugely interdisciplinary enterprise. As the diverse research cited in this chapter illustrates, it requires the full range of techniques of cognitive science: psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, connectionism, Frequency-based accounts of SLA p. 11 dynamic systems theory, educational evaluation, child language acquisition, psychology, and computational modelling. Language is a complex adaptive system involving interactions at all levels, and we need to measure these processes and try to understand its emergence thence (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006b, 2009b; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; MacWhinney, 1999). The studies cited in more detail in the next section and elsewhere in this chapter illustrate some of the relevant techniques.