Thomas Herbst
Don't Aim Too High! – ColloConstruction Grammar as a Challenge to Established Convictions and Concepts
Speaker
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Thomas Herbst
Thomas Herbst
Date of birth: 01/06/1953
Place of birth: Nürnberg, Germany
1972–1978: University education:
subjects: English and German
universities: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) (FAU) and University of Oxford (year abroad)
1979–1980 University of Reading, Great Britain (lector for German)
1983 Ph.D. on the valency of English adjectives and their nominalizations (FAU)
1990 Habilitation on linguistic aspects of the dubbing of tv series into German (Universität Augsburg)
1991-1993 Professor of English Linguistics (FAU)
since 1993: Chair of English Linguistics (FAU)
Speaker of FAU Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Lexicography, Valency and Collocation (since 2005)
President of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (since 2018)
Co-editor of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) and Lexicographica (journal and book series)
Abstract →
Thomas Herbst
Don't Aim Too High! – ColloConstruction Grammar as a Challenge to Established Convictions and Concepts
This talk will focus on the importance of knowledge related to particular lexical items and of low-level generalizations in the description of language.
In the first part of the talk I will focus on problems arising in the context of teaching English to foreign learners and show how traditional concepts of collocation and valency, which are related to specific items, can be combined with a cognitively plausible model of Construction Grammar (taking both Bybee’s exemplar theory and Goldberg’s model of argument structure constructions into account).
Part II will present an attempt to outline how the noun phrase in English can best be described as a family of constructions if one aims at cognitive plausibility. Again, the role of low-level generalizations will be emphasized.
Finally, an attempt will be made to sketch out first ideas for a constructionist approach to syntactic analysis (Herbst & Hoffmann 2018), which will involve the concept of blending as developed by Fauconnier and Turner and the importance of transitional probabilities.
This talk will focus on the importance of knowledge related to particular lexical items and of low-level generalizations in the description of language.
In the first part of the talk I will focus on problems arising in the context of teaching English to foreign learners and show how traditional concepts of collocation and valency, which are related to specific items, can be combined with a cognitively plausible model of Construction Grammar (taking both Bybee’s exemplar theory and Goldberg’s model of argument structure constructions into account).
Part II will present an attempt to outline how the noun phrase in English can best be described as a family of constructions if one aims at cognitive plausibility. Again, the role of low-level generalizations will be emphasized.
Finally, an attempt will be made to sketch out first ideas for a constructionist approach to syntactic analysis (Herbst & Hoffmann 2018), which will involve the concept of blending as developed by Fauconnier and Turner and the importance of transitional probabilities.