“Because It Sounds Right”: A Guiding Light of Speaker Knowledge

Diana Van Lancker Sidtis

doi:10.22158/selt.v7n3p345

Abstract

Approaches to second language teaching have included continuous exposure, grammar lessons, and a various combinations of these methods. Recent studies highlight specific, detailed knowledge, in speakers of a language, of the phonetic and structural information of many kinds of phrases. These include formulaic expressions (idioms, proverbs, conversational speech formulas, expletives), lexical bundles (sentence stems, conventional expressions, discourse organizers), and collocations (a range of other unitary, multiword expressions). These exemplars share the feature of familiarity: they are known and recognized by speakers of a language, and stored in mental representation with their concomitant features of structure, phonetic and prosodic shape, meaning, and use. In addition, the linguistic sciences currently advance the perspective that language competence is constituted by knowledge of constructions at various levels of abstraction, implying a larger role of memory in language competence than previously understood. Performance by persons with neurological disorders reveals specific effects on production of these kinds of phrases. Given the putatively extremely large repertory of known, stored expressions and constructions that have been shown to constitute language representation, a guiding principle of speaker use might be that the expression sounds right, implying special importance to listening exercises in second language learning.

Highlights

The alert listener, being properly primed, will frequently observe recurrent, apparently unitary expressions in everyday language use (Butler, 1997; Moon, 1998; Kuiper, 2004, 2009; Pawley & Syder, 1983; Fillmore, 1979), expressions that are recognizable as “known” or familiar, as traces in long term memory
The ubiquity and number of these familiar expressions in all of discourse casts a thin veil of suspicion on the full explanatory value of the grammatical-rule-and-lexical-unit orthodoxy, the standard view of the cognitive science revolution in the 1950s (e.g., Chomsky, 1975)
Observations in second language learning, psychology of mental representation, speech perception, the development of construction grammars, and neurolinguistic findings all lend support to the notion that much of language competence rests on manipulation of episodically stored phrasal material

Summary

Introduction

The alert listener, being properly primed, will frequently observe recurrent, apparently unitary expressions in everyday language use (Butler, 1997; Moon, 1998; Kuiper, 2004, 2009; Pawley & Syder, 1983; Fillmore, 1979), expressions that are recognizable as “known” or familiar, as traces in long term memory. An easy labeling is utilized, forming three categories: formulaic expressions (conversational speech formulas, idioms, expletives, pause fillers, sayings); lexical bundles (sentence initials and connecting phrases) and collocations (please see Figure 1) Items in these classes have in common that they are known to speakers. Third line of the plural portion, Meinen guten Freunden, to (or for) my good friends, one sees that an “n” is appended to the noun. This always happens to any word that doesn’t already have a “n” in the plural (some do, as “n” forms the plural for many nouns). Implicit memory stores phrases with their native sound and shape

Psychology

Findings

Conclusions