Protogrammar
Activity 13
|
In your own L1, or in the language that you teach, write down the name of the first three pieces of furniture you can think of. ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ In your own L1, or in the language that you teach, write down the first sentences you can think of with the equivalent of 'There is/are…'. (eg imasu/arimasu in Japanese, há/tem in Portuguese, and so on) ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Check your answers in the Commentary before you read on. |
When asked to name a piece of furniture, many people will answer 'table', 'chair', or 'sofa'. This is because table, chair and sofa are the most representative members of the category furniture (Rosch, 1975, 1976, 1977) commonly known as prototypes. The same phenomenon occurs for other categories. When asked to name a bird, people tend towards robins, sparrows, and so on, but not penguins: robins and sparrows are more prototypical because they fly; penguins do not fly. The prototypical bird has wings, feathers, a beak, two legs, and can fly. When asked to give examples of any category they know, people tend towards the prototypes, and this is as true for grammatical categories as it is for birds.
There is evidence that people classify all knowledge in terms of categories, with prototypes at the core of the category. When asked to give an example of a grammatical category such as noun, most people will give concrete, common nouns like 'table' and 'book', but will rarely give abstract nouns like 'education' and 'linguistics'. Again, this is because concrete nouns are the prototypes of the category.
Prepositions as a grammatical category also function as a category with prototypes. The features of the preposition 'in', for example, are that it is concrete and is delineated in space (Hayashi, 1999). Other uses, or extensions, of this preposition, lack one or other of these features (Table 3.3).
| Concrete / delineated | Example |
| + concrete | Meanwhile, melt the white chocolate in a bowl. |
| + delineated | We live in the country during the summer. |
| + concrete | The sun is already high in the sky. |
| - delineated | They've turned up in a couple of national papers. |
| - concrete | A small dialogue box appears when the printer is in operation. |
| - delineated | Jack was in agreement with most of his fellow-students |
Table 3.3: the preposition 'in'
Typically, textbooks teach the prototype systematically, but not the extensions, which are actually more common in real language than the prototype. The same is true for the preposition 'on', which is characterized in its prototype as concrete and horizontal (Table 3.4).
| Concrete / horizontal surface | Example |
| + concrete | Jack's sitting on the floor watching TV. |
| + horizontal surface | There was blood splashed on the carpet |
| + concrete | Please keep your dog on a chain. |
| - horizontal surface | These shoes have given me blisters on my heel. |
| - concrete | Air traffic controllers are on strike. |
| - horizontal surface | He is now on trial for murder. |
Table 3.4: the preposition 'on'
If we look at the existential structure (ie the structure containing 'there is/are' in English, 'há/tem' in Portuguese, and 'imasu/arimasu' in Japanese), we can see again how prototypes prevail as the intuitional response. The existential structure is universal in that it occurs in all languages. In English, we use the dummy pronoun 'there' in sentences like:
'There is a pencil on the table.'
This pattern is found widely in textbooks, and is a structural pattern that is fairly standard across languages, with the existential phrase followed by a noun phrase (NP), 'a pencil' in this example, and a prepositional phrase (PP), 'on the table' (see Table 3.5).
| Language | Existential phrase (there+be) | Noun phrase (NP) | Prepositional phrase (PP) | ||
| English | There is | a pencil | on the table. | ||
| Portuguese | Tem | um lapis | na mesa | ||
| Have-3rd person singular | a pencil |
on the table
|
|||
| Japanese | empitsu | ga | teburu | ni | arimasu. |
| pencil-subject | table on | be | |||
Table 3.5: prototypical existential structure in different languages
This pattern is the prototype and is commonly taught in textbooks, and it is typical of the responses people give when asked to produce a sentence of this structure; yet there are at least six different existential patterns to be found in the corpus of authentic spoken English. These other patterns are seen as extensions away from the prototype (Figure 3.3):
Figure 3.3: existential prototype and extensions
What does all this mean? Well, textbooks tend to teach the prototypes of language structures (prepositions, nouns, and existential constructions, for example), because these accord with the intuitions of textbook writers. Of interest also is the fact that native speakers of any language will produce prototypes when asked to give examples of, say, the existential structure or the past tense.
Many grammatical constructions are universal. This means that native speakers of Portuguese, for example, will have in their minds a prototypical vision of, say the existential structure, and it is more than likely that they will expect to see something similar when starting to learn English.
In other words, as textbook grammar is largely prototypical, it may make sense to use this traditional approach for beginner-level textbooks. At higher levels of proficiency, it would seem to be advisable to use more authentic texts and sources, so that students are exposed to more complex representations of grammar, ie extensions away from the prototype.
This allows us to posit an overall grammatical syllabus that will start with the prototypical representations, and gradually move towards real-world language. In parallel, we can also suggest that lower-level classes will be teacher-led, and will use prescriptive, rule-of-thumb grammar and a deductive teaching approach, while higher levels will be student-centred, will involve exposure to complex, authentic grammar patterns, and will be inductive in methodology (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4: an overview of grammar teaching across proficiency levels
