Conceptual Metaphors for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs to French learners.

Typological differences between Romance and Germanic languages (Talmy 1985 and 2002; Slobin 1996) can help explain why French-speaking learners of Germanic languages like Dutch or German encounter difficulties in the acquisition of motion or location expressions (See among others Lemmens 2002; Lemmens and Perrez in press; De Knop and Dirven 2008; De Knop Fortc.). These difficulties pertain more specifically to the non-prototypical, more abstract uses of posture verbs (Dutch: staan, zitten, liggen; German: stehen, sitzen, liegen; English: ‘to stand’, ‘to sit’, ‘to lie’), e.g. (1) Ik zie het niet zitten *’I don’t see it sit’ (= ‘I don’t see that it can work’); (2) De verantwoordelijkheid ligt bij jou *’The responsibility lies with you’ (= ‘You have the responsibility’); (3) Das Kleid sitzt nicht *’The skirt does not sit’ (= ‘The skirt does not fit’); (4) Es liegt was in der Luft *’Something is lying in the air’ (= ‘There is something in the air’); (5) Der Unterschied liegt darin, dass… ‘The difference lies in the fact, that…’ Against the background of the quantitative and qualitative study by Lemmens and Perrez (in press) and the descriptions of the semantic networks of German and Dutch posture verbs by Kutscher and Schultze-Bernd (2007), Lemmens (2002), and Serra-Borneto (1996), our presentation will first describe the typological differences between French on the one hand and German and Dutch on the other hand and the problems of under- or overuse of posture verbs encountered by French-speaking learners. It will further show how a language teaching methodology based on conceptual metaphor like ABSTRACT STATES ARE POSITION/LOCATION and metaphorical concepts like CONTAINMENT or CONTACT can help facilitate the acquisition of the more abstract uses of posture verbs. References De Knop, S. & R. Dirven. 2008. Motion and location events in German, French and English: A typological, contrastive and pedagogical approach. In De Knop, S. & T. De Rycker (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar – A Volume in Honour of René Dirven, 295-324. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. De Knop, S. Forthc. Visualisation and conceptual metaphor as tools for the teaching of abstract motion in German. In Juchem-Grundmann, C. & S. Niemeier (eds.), KNOWING IS SEEING: Metaphor and Language Pedagogy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kutscher, S. & E. Schultze-Berndt 2007. Why a folder lies in the basket although it is not lying : The semantics and use of German positional verbs with inanimate Figures. Linguistics 45 (5-6): 983-1028. Lemmens, M. 2002. The semantic network of Dutch posture verbs, In Newman, John (ed.), The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying, 103-139 [Typological Studies in Language 51]. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lemmens, M. & J. Perrez. In press. On the use of posture verbs by French-speaking learners of Dutch: a corpus-based study. Cognitive Linguistics. Serra Borneto, C. 1996. ‘Liegen’ and ‘stehen’ in German: A study in horizontality and verticality. In: Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods, E. Casad (ed.), 458-505. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Slobin, Dan I. 1996. Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning, 195–220, M. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 57–149, Timothy Shopen (ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press