Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition

As far back as the eigthies, Langacker (1985) advocated a usage-based approach to language and cognition. But at that time many linguists worked on constructed examples and failed to see the central place of linguistic corpora and the need to work with authentic material. In the Call for Papers of the LAUD-symposium 2010 about cognitive sociolinguistics organized by Martin Pütz and his colleagues the need for Cognitive Linguistics (CL) to work with more authentic material was expressed. Corpus data reflect different conceptualizations and different levels of variety, dependent on various registers, dialects, age, gender,… which are expressed through language : « In the past decades, linguistic analyses within Cognitive Linguistics or other cognitively oriented theories were all too often carried out at the level of ‘a general, uniform language’, disregarding the rich and complex patterns of intralingual and communicative variation in that language. » (Pütz, CfP LAUD 2010) In 1999 Schönefeld pointed the complementarity of assumptions made by cognitive linguists and corpus linguists. Since then, the value of corpus data has been illustrated in numerous studies dealing with lexical and grammatical issues (see for instance Gries & Stefanowitsch 2006 or Gonzales-Marquez et al. 2007). Other convergences have been highlighted between cognition and instruction (Ellis & Robinson 2008), corpora and pedagogy (Granger et al. 2002, O’Keeffe et al. 2007) and even between the three paradigms (Meunier 2009). But little has been offered in puncto of concrete applications which would investigate and illustrate the interface, the meeting points between corpus linguistics – in this case even learner corpora – and CL (except for Stefanowitsch 2010 and Gries 2006). The questions we deal with are : what can corpus linguistics bring to CL and the other way round, what can CL bring to corpus linguistics/learner corpora. The special issue explores insights from CL with respect to learner corpora with respect to grammar (see e.g. frameworks like Cognitive Grammar, (Radical) Construction Grammar and Blending Theory), and their applications in second and foreign language learning and teaching