Applied cognitive linguistics and second/foreign language varieties: Towards an explanatory account

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

The chapter starts by giving a broad overview of the field of applied cognitive linguistics, with special emphasis on second/foreign language teaching (which has attracted quite some attention in the cognitive literature) and second/foreign language learning (which tends to have been neglected). In Section 3, two case studies are used to illustrate how cognitive linguistics can account for some of the non-standard characteristics found in second and foreign language varieties. The first case study deals with transfer in English as a foreign language, using the concepts of prototypicality and psychotypology, whilst the second one adopts a Construction Grammar approach to study the misuse of prepositional complements in institutionalized second-language varieties of English (New Englishes). The case studies, which both rely on corpus data, also serve to demonstrate that the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics represents a valuable complement to the descriptive adequacy of corpus linguistics, and that the combination of the two frameworks has much to offer from an applied perspective. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of what I see as promising avenues for research in applied cognitive linguistics, as well as some concluding remarks.