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Article published In: Bringing Figurative Language into Real L2 Classrooms: The challenges of empirical testing
Edited by Ana M. Piquer-Píriz and Reyes Llopis-García
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 22:2] 2024
► pp. 374–401

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Special issue article

Pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the pluperfect in Spanish

Language users’ judgements and corpus searches as pre-experimental validation criteria

 | University of Granada
 | University of Granada
Published online: 29 August 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00199.san
Abstract
Second/foreign language grammar studies usually focus on the validation of grammatical conceptualizations with learners, sometimes overlooking the paramount need to test these conceptualizations against users’ judgements and corpus searches as a way of verifying the relevance, frequency and suitability of the items, examples or explanations before the experimental phases. This paper deals with three pre-experimental validation criteria employed to measure the pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the Spanish pluperfect: (1) learner corpus searches based on caes – Corpus de Aprendices de Español –, (2) native-speaker corpus searches by means of EsTenTen-18-subcorpus from Sketch Engine, and (3) language users’ judgements. This tense rarely receives enough attention in learning materials due to its apparent simplicity in terms of both morphology and functional import. However, learner corpus searches show certain instability in its use. This paper explores the steps taken within the research project imagine in relation to this tense, including grammatical descriptions developed within the Cognitive Grammar framework and from a temporal-epistemic perspective in an attempt to account for the variety of uses of this tense.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Research framework
    • 1.2Justification of this study
    • 1.3Research goals and methodology
  • 2.Grammatical conceptualizations of the pluperfect
    • 2.1Pluperfect in narrative contexts
    • 2.2Pluperfect in contexts relevant to the current sphere
    • 2.3Pluperfect in unreal/counterfactual contexts
  • 3.Research results
    • 3.1Native-speaker corpus searches
      • 3.1.1Example of a pluperfect construction proved valid by corpus searches
      • 3.1.2Example of a pluperfect construction discarded after corpus searches
    • 3.2Users’ judgements
      • 3.2.1Research question 1
        • Research question
        • Results
      • 3.2.2Research question 2
        • Research question
        • Results
      • 3.2.3Research question 3
        • Research question
        • Results
      • 3.2.4Research question 4
        • Research question
        • Results
  • 4.Conclusions
  • References
References (18)
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