Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System

This book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the 'Common European Framework of Reference for Languages' (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning.

Inhalt
Part I. Constructional Approaches to Language Complexity.- Introduction: Theoretical Prerequisites.- 1. Complex Adaptive Systems: The Case of Language.- 2. The Complex Dynamics of Meaning Construction.- 3. Construction Grammars.- Part II. Experimental Studies: Psychological Evidence of Constructional Meaning.- Introduction: Priming.- 4. Sentence-sorting Experiment.- 5. Sentence-elicitation Experiment.- 6. Sentence-completion Experiment.- 7. Concluding Remarks.