Transcript Conceptualisation and Construal

İDB 426
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Different ways of conceptualising of a scene
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It affects grammar of language and accounts
for why we select one form over another form
Uçak arabaların üstünde.
Arabalar uçağın altında.
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Construal operations often determine our selection of
lexis and grammar
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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
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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’
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Conceptualisation of target language itself. E.g., inflectional
morphology. Teaching the plural morpheme
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Lexical-grammatical continuum: Teaching the meaning of
derivational morphemes. ‘-er’, ‘-ee’
Attention/salience
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Interpreting a form by its function or a
product by a producer
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We call a car ‘a nice set of wheels’ because we
make a selection, singling out ‘wheels’ as
that vehicle’s most salient aspect.
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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)
(40)
‘the field’ in its entirety
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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 Road
The 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
member
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Difficulty 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’.