Third Party Funds Group - Sub project
Acronym: GRK 2839 Project 6
Start date : 01.10.2022
End date : 30.09.2027
Although the study of idioms has played a crucial role in the development of Construction Grammar (e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004, Fillmore et al. 1988), there are still only a few studies comparing constructions with a relatively high degree of idiomaticity in different languages (e.g. Abel 2003, Apresjan 2014, see also Gries and Wulff (2005) for a more general study of constructions in foreign language learners). Idioms that are motivated semantically are common across different languages (e.g. Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2010). These idioms can share the same underlying functional (semantic/pragmatic) properties and form such as A wolf in a sheep’s clothing in English, Ein Wolf im Schafspelz in German and gorgī dar lebāse mish in Persian. Or they can be motivated by similar symbolic or cultural concepts or coercion but have different forms as in to take the bread out of someone’s mouth in English, das ist ein hartes Brot in German, and nān-e kasi rā ājor kardan ‘make someone’s bread a brick’ in Persian. he major goals of this project are (i) to examine how and to what extent the processing of L2 idiomatic constructions is influenced by the existence of similar idiomatic constructions in the L1 and (ii) to determine which factors, e.g., age of learning, typological similarity or frequency and context of use, contribute to the entrenchment of L2 and L1 idiomatic constructions.
In the first phase of the project, a contrastive corpus analysis (e.g. Granger 2002) will be used to identify semantically similar idiomatic constructions and their frequencies in the three languages: English, German and Persian. By using phrase classification tasks (e.g. Swinney and Cutler 1979) and priming experiments (including sentence generation and completion tasks), similar to the ones, for example, described by Sprenger et al. (2006) and Yeganehjoo and Thai (2012), the receptive and productive knowledge of comparable idiomatic expressions in L1 and L2 learners of English, German and Persian will be tested in order to determine to what extent the processing of L2 idioms is facilitated by the existence of similar constructions entrenched in the L1 of an L2 learner. This part of the project will address GRQ CON4 (To what extent can constructions (and their constituents) identified in one language be equated with superficially similar constructions in another language?) as well as CON1 (How do we identify constructions?).
The results of the experiments obtained in the first phase will form the basis of the analyses carried out in the second phase, in which specific hypotheses about factors possibly influencing the entrenchment of L1 and L2 idiomatic constructions will be tested. In particular, by comparing the results obtained for different age groups of L1 and L2 learners, different L1 and L2 pairings of typologically more similar and more distinct languages, different types of idiomatic expressions (i.e., those that share the same functional properties and form across different languages vs. those that are motivated by similar symbolic or cultural concepts but have different forms) and
idiomatic expressions differing in terms of their frequency and contexts of use, the possible effects
of different factors that have generally been claimed to affect the processing and entrenchment
of constructions will be examined with regard to the specific role they play in the processing of L1
and L2 idiomatic expressions (for the possible contribution of different factors to the processing
and entrenchment of constructions and/or idiomatic expressions, see, e.g., Abel 2003, Apresjan
2014, Divjak and Cardwell-Harris 2015, Steinkrauss and Schmid 2016, Wasserscheidt 2014).
This part of the project will address GRQ ENT1 (How do factors such as frequency, salience,
dispersion and age of acquisition influence entrenchment?). If time permits, we will also conduct
ERP studies to examine the neural correlates of L1 and L2 idiomatic constructions in L1 and L2
speakers, which would allow us to address ENT3 (To what extent do measures of neural activity
during language processing coincide with the results of behavioural and corpus data and how
does this expand our understanding of how constructions are stored and processed in speakers’
brains?.
Naturally, insights gained in this project will also make a contribution towards applying
Construction Grammar to foreign language teaching (De Knop and Gilquin 2016, Herbst 2017,
Erfurt & De Knop 2019, see also special issue of ZAA edited by Piske, Herbst & Uhrig 2014).