Erzählen und kognitive Konstruktionsgrammatik (Grammatik in der Schule | SoSe 2026)

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-10

[00:00:02]So, good morning.

[00:00:03]Welcome to the lecture on grammar in schools. Today I find myself in a somewhat difficult situation, as on the one hand I would very much like to explain construction grammar to you in more detail, but at the same time I know that this is a topic in its own right. If you are interested in learning more, I would like to recommend the lecture from last semester and would at least like to give you a brief indication today of the direction this can take and, above all, what interest a cognitive construction grammar has in storytelling. This means that we essentially continue the topics from the last two sessions and say, okay, where do we have a good overlap, before we then move on to construction didactics next week? That is, the question is, how can the principles of construction grammar be applied didactically? And believe me, you don't necessarily need to have spent the last 25 years immersed in the school of construction grammar for that. Um, the core principles can also be implemented in this way, and one can gradually get used to the paradigm, I say cautiously.

[00:01:26]So, the point today, or the point where we stopped last week, was the consideration that one can draw on the teaching methods in schools and the opportunities that the curricula provide for teachers, and above all, the educational programs published by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK) with their educational standards. um, central points of contact can be found by imparting grammatical knowledge or learning grammar, as Falke and Topinke said, using a concrete example.

[00:02:07]This means that learning is no longer done detached from context using example sentences with gap-fill exercises, and so on, but rather that one learns from the object itself and, above all, learns what is relevant for describing the object. We looked at this in the last lecture using a very simple text that is very simply narrative. I would increase the complexity a little today; they will notice. Um, and that one already gets the impression from the example material that other grammatical categories suddenly play a bigger role than before, and that one can then show, in the progression of how to deal with children in school, what the challenge of the whole thing actually is, using which material. Um, I would very much like to begin by, um, reiterating this, um, this scheme, that narration plays a major role in, um, the study of grammar. And we will take a closer look at this today using various research papers. I would like to introduce you to two that, funnily enough, go back to the same German Studies Day in Berlin, namely at Reud 2016, where the focus was on narrative and there were two panels, one of which was organized by Anja Binancer, who has now held the professorship in the field of statistics for some time, and the other panel was organized by Konstanze Spieß and Torus Doris Tinke. Um, and one of them was more for mediation within the mediation process. So, the question is, what can we learn besides stories when we, uh, go into mediation?

[00:03:57]And the other one was more construction grammar oriented, so it was more pattern-based.

[00:04:02]What you see here is the introduction from the volume on grammar counting and grammar for narratives, edited by Anja Binanzer, Miram Longlotz and Verena Wecker, among others, and in the introduction you see a term that already shines through a bit. It was shaped by Michael Rödel. The so-called AC grammar, that is, the didactic perspectives of an AC grammar that are relevant. Then you will see, uh, a quote from Falke and Tinke. Yes. Um, for reasons. And don't worry, I'll get to Falke and Topinke later. Um, but we 're still in the introductory phase here.

[00:04:42]Therefore, I'll give myself a little more time. And you can see that Falco Pinke's idea of grammatical learning was very adaptable to various disciplines. This is partly due to the fact that Falke and Tinke also play a significant role in construction grammar. So you can also see in the networks how ideas develop and how they are then used. Um, essentially, you see here in this outline the topic that storytelling can be placed as a central learning atlas for linguistic means in the subject matter of the lesson. And as you saw in the last lecture on educational standards, narratives are anchored in the curriculum at different times in all three different types of schools, so it really only depends on us to find beautiful narratives to engage with. So, that means it's a relatively relaxed, uh, uh option for us. And I would like to cordially invite you, if you know any beautiful stories that you think are particularly interesting from a grammatical perspective, please feel free to send them to me.

[00:05:56]So, for those who are here in the lecture, also in the matrix. Um, please no pirated copies, I would only use the title of the publication.

[00:06:04]Yes, okay. That is perhaps the first perspective when one looks at which contributions are brought together in the volume. I might elaborate on this a little. You see, it's a very classic didactic orientation for various reasons, with quite different research networks collaborating on it.

[00:06:27]Um, that's why it makes sense to combine these two perspectives.

[00:06:31]So, contributions from, um, Ursula Predel are seen as narrative patterns.

[00:06:37]Um, besides, um, what interests me most are the syntactic adventures in oral storytelling and so on and so forth. You see a relatively, um, federal, uh, uh, federal program compiled in this volume, and I also want to show you the second volume. That's um, or say uh, oh, now I've gone back.

[00:07:00]Right and left aren't really my thing. Um, which also goes back to this German Studies conference, namely Everyday Practices of Storytelling, edited by Konstanze Spieß and Doris Tinke. Um, and there the program is a little different, namely, we actually have individual contributions from Lut Hoffmann, whom I highly recommend reading as one of the, let's say, linguists who have a very broad overview of very different linguistic traditions, and then, um, particularly relevant are the works of Uta Quasthof on this topic. Topic and by Helger Kottoff. Um, and then you see, uh, above all, uh, another contribution by Noa Bumhofer on seriality, uh, on the seriality of singularity, that is, the uh, uniqueness in each individual narrative, which then becomes uniform in series.

[00:08:02]Only Bubenhof has spent a very long time dealing with birth stories, that is, young women reporting on how they experienced the first birth of a child, and you can imagine that the plot is relatively clear, so as long as everything goes well during the birth, the plot is relatively clear. um, and then, in speaking, stereotypes are used to describe it in a particular way. So that means patterns emerge, and Alexander Zim and I had a contribution in this volume on construction grammar approaches to narrative texts.

[00:08:34]That's the topic right now, and that's why I'm showing you these two perspectives. Okay, but first I would like to look at the functions of storytelling that Konstanze Spieß and Doris Pinke have compiled in the introductory article, and these will be of particular interest to us from a cognitive linguistic perspective, because as you may have already seen in the last two sessions, when we say that we describe grammar using narratives in the context of text, from a cognitive linguistic perspective it is always about saying that we have to describe language as a holistic phenomenon.

[00:09:17]So it is not enough that we hope that the author of a text is dead and that we can discuss the text with them and be contradicted, but we also look at all performance phenomena that are associated with such a text. Ideally, when you go to the theatre for a drama, you do n't read stage directions or directorial instructions in a text, but rather you watch the production and then see what has become of this text and discuss the whole thing. And that's exactly what cognitive linguistics would demand: that language is described as a holistic phenomenon within a social context, and that these contexts are taken into account.

[00:10:02]And as you can see, last time we looked at educational standards, and those are narratives or grammar. When grammar plays a role, it's always about questions like, how did we identify a word and sentence element, and what is a present tense or preterite?

[00:10:16]Other questions that play a grammatical role are not addressed at all in these educational standards. You will find them in a completely different place, namely storytelling has an identity-forming or even identity-constructing function. When you tell a story, you, as the speaker, tell a story from your point of view, and in doing so, you construct your own identity and the identities of others, specifically from your personal point of view.

[00:10:44]The next thing, for example, we have autobiographical narratives, where we would have exactly this starting point again, then belonging to social groups and cultures is brought to light.

[00:10:56]If you've ever wondered why Russian fairy tales look different from German-language fairy tales, it's because the cultural context in which they are told is different.

[00:11:07]Um, the adaptation of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights is quite interesting in this context. um, by um, by Hoffmann, um, and the actual fairy tale almenare that are told. Yes, so that means it's a very special form. We'll definitely take a look at that, because there are some really nice stories there. Um, then we have a delimiting, integrating function in the context of marking membership or non-membership of groups.

[00:11:40]So, they may or may not be familiar with the structure of narratives.

[00:11:44]They have the ability to position themselves socially. Um, they serve to create social closeness and distance.

[00:11:52]Um, and in doing so, they secure, um, social relationships.

[00:11:57]So, when you tell a story, you spend time with another person. Well, since we are social beings, this is not entirely unimportant.

[00:12:07]Then knowledge is acquired, processed, and imparted. You are familiar with the discussion about fairy tales, whether they might be too cruel for children. Yes, so if you permanently burn the witch, uh, children cope surprisingly well with it. They are more afraid of the darkness of the forest.

[00:12:21]Um, but whether you put the witch in the oven or not is secondary. But that means, uh, a lot of knowledge is imparted about, um, human community. Um, storytelling can, in the interactional context, serve to reassure oneself about the shared world and view of reality.

[00:12:43]The image disappears briefly. um, be of service.

[00:12:46]That means, um, they reassure themselves of social belonging within their group and secure, um, their shared worldview, uh, insofar as, for example, certain fairy tales are no longer told.

[00:12:59]Or perhaps you know the discussion about Strufelpeter, yes, the one in which children either have their thumbs cut off or drown because they aren't paying attention, or starve because they do n't want to eat the soup. And in societal discussions, there is already some consideration as to whether this is still entirely suitable for children. Um, and just from these discussions they realize that we are negotiating a culture and worldview through these stories, and of course you can also use them to cause alarm, for example, by saying, "Let's look at texts that we believe should no longer be read today." Um, a Germanic medieval studies approach attempts to do the same thing, if you will, by presenting texts in which certain social constructs are different than they are today. And that means we can explore and share more or less communicative worlds without them having any consequences for our real lives.

[00:13:56]That's what makes it special. In these stories, you can explore configurations that necessarily have no consequences for those telling or listening to the story. So they can revel in the suffering, misfortune, happiness, and unhappiness of others without being affected themselves. So, storytelling in interactive environments creates a safe space where they can be scared by anything that is, uh, scary.

[00:14:27]But there will be no consequences for them, and that's what makes storytelling so particularly appealing for people in a community. Okay, what is special about the stories from a cognitive linguistic perspective? And I would like to explain it to you, or from a linguistic perspective, and I would n't even read the quote to him here, but above all, I would like to focus on the three, on the triad. There is an interactional linguistic approach, which involves observing people as they tell each other stories, which follow their own logic and systems. There is a grammatical approach because these stories that are told ideally represent coherent texts with a continuous plot, so that the linguistic units are somehow related to each other in such a way that they can be understood. And the last one is a cognitive linguistic perspective, which focuses primarily on what benefits storytelling can offer for memory performance? How do you pre-structure the world? How do you shape mental processes, for example, by having exemplary narratives and then putting forward certain interpretive patterns for a specific social configuration?

[00:15:45]These are the three central perspectives, and I would like to try to combine the last two.

[00:15:55]I would like to put the interactional linguistic perspective, i.e., how people tell each other stories, somewhat aside, but please keep it in the background.

[00:16:01]Okay, I would like to present you with a very nice story. You probably don't know them. This is, uh, by Georg Willroda from 1958, " The Land Without Letters". This is a story for children who are starting school.

[00:16:23]When Inge came to, she found herself in the middle of a square. You can keep the last story in mind and look at the construction and grammatical patterns that distinguish it from the story from 14 days ago. If you wish, you can also take notes. I will need her input again later.

[00:16:49]Very old houses stood in a circle around them, and above them towered an incredibly large, black castle that floated into the clouds like an evil harbinger over a frightened flock of chickens.

[00:16:59]The square was full of stalls.

[00:17:03]Ingelein wanted to know what they sell in the Buten. The little boy shrugged. No idea. In the land without letters, there are no signs and no boards. Why don't you ask the market woman there? She went to the market woman.

[00:17:15]She had displayed her little patch of corn.

[00:17:17]"Oh, lovely Arnesblätzchen!" Inge exclaimed: "I'll buy us a few." Did you buy something with Ahne's cookies? "The woman grumbled." I have 25 pfennigs left. Inge took them out of her bag and placed them on the market woman's counter. Then she started to laugh, and then the neighbor, a sausage vendor, laughed too, and next door the flower woman laughed, and on the right the shooting gallery guy. Soon the whole marketplace was laughing, but it did n't sound funny at all. No, they were all laughing. Everyone laughed, but they laughed very angrily, really bitterly. Yes. And then the music, er, market woman even had tears in her eyes.

[00:17:51]Buy, buy. We can't buy anything and we can't sell anything. We have no signs and no price lists. We have no idea how much that stuff costs.

[00:17:59]You're probably new here. Then just make sure you get back home as quickly as possible. We are in the land without letters, and the chief wizard makes sure that no letters enter the land. He doesn't allow even the smallest "I".

[00:18:12]I won't tell you how the story ends. It 's a very beautiful story, which also has its sad moments. Nevertheless, it is a story that is told from many different perspectives, and much more so than the story you saw 14 days ago. There are several reasons for this. Um, I'll get to that later. Why does construction grammar—er, cognitive construction grammar—have an interest in narrative?

[00:18:43]Perhaps as an introduction to the literature, I would actually only like to recommend Elisabeth Zim's introduction to usage-based cognitive linguistics to you today. You are very welcome to access both herbs via the SLUB website and view them digitally. Why? Um, Elisabeth Zima gives an overview of the development of cognitive grammar and explains key problem areas in such a way that they can understand them very well. I can only present excerpts today, but I think you will see where the journey is headed, and if one understands cognitive grammar or grammar in this way, narratives in particular are an excellent subject.

[00:19:33]Okay, maybe a very brief word about the premises. Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar assume that meaning and linguistic knowledge structures emerge through use.

[00:19:47]That means it makes sense to tell each other stories. It is also useful to listen to stories, because this is how linguistic knowledge is formed in the language verb "äh" in children and also in adults. Yes, that means adults learn too. Um, there is no subject, no predicate, and no object; rather, for children and for all of them, linguistic structures are individually put into use.

[00:20:17]Um, if you're interested in exactly how this all fits together, I can recommend the works of Michael Thomasello. On the origin of thought and language as a cultural artifact.

[00:20:30]Um, this is important for you in your future teaching career, because children do n't bring grammatically categorized grammar with them. They don't know what a verb is.

[00:20:43]That's knowledge they have to secondarily encode into the language—er, the linguistic knowledge—that children bring with them to school. But they are well aware that there is someone who is taking action. There is certainly an awareness that someone can be harmed, and one should actually connect to these categorizations from language use when it comes to teaching grammar.

[00:21:07]The next thing is, um, the principle of the joint. This means that we as human beings are capable of establishing a shared focus of attention and remaining focused on that shared focus. At the same time, we know that when we tell a story, someone is listening to us, and we know that the definition of the situation is largely adequate. So, for example, you know that I know that you are listening, and I know that you know that I am talking.

[00:21:44]Yes, so it's a bit of a cross- logic, and this backstop works continuously the whole time. Many things and many communications that they initiate only happen because someone, or rather, someone, has a shared definition of the situation in which they both know what is happening.

[00:22:04]Twenty years ago, this was illustrated with such a nice example over the phone.

[00:22:08]If you are quiet for 10 seconds on the phone, the person on the other end will ask if you are still there.

[00:22:13]And one of the reasons for this is not because he wants to transmit information, but because he is fundamentally unsure whether the shared definition of the situation still exists.

[00:22:23]And you can use this reassurance when telling the story, because that's exactly what the storytelling focuses on. They sit around the campfire, yes, and what they have in common is the shared focus on the progress of their story. That's also why people like to sit around a campfire. Yes, not only because it's warm, but because they have a common point where they can gather.

[00:22:50]The next point is that we not only—and this is Ari Hagen, I'll do this very briefly—it's about always telling them stories, not only producing individual communicative acts that are relevant for the current definition of the situation, but also conventionalizing narratives in their cultures and their conversational culture, with which they enter into long cultural references and traditions. That was what Konstanze Spieß meant in the introduction with the topic: yes, we are somehow, uh, we produce and reproduce traditions or visual materials, and we more or less practice storytelling. Think also of the Homonaran, which states that essentially our world and construction of reality function through the narratives we tell.

[00:23:47]And from their earliest childhood days, they are confronted with this pattern. That means they cannot escape from the narrative cultures at all.

[00:23:59]Then embryonic emboldening.

[00:24:02]Emotim is particularly relevant in cognitive linguistics because it is assumed that actions or processes associated with the body are remembered particularly well. So maybe you've fallen off a ladder or out of a tree as a child, then you'll have noticed that the vertical arrangement of your body in space is quite relevant when you fall from somewhere, because it hurts.

[00:24:31]Then, um, it's like this: when they speak— and this is something we tend to forget in linguistics, so in some areas not so much, but in others yes— they speak with their bodies, meaning they breathe, they produce a sound, they gesture, and when they typically read a story to someone, for example, that person sits quite close to them. So, that means something like spatial proximity and intimacy is also created.

[00:25:05]And that means that when they form such a close-knit community, they do incredibly important relationship work with the people around them.

[00:25:20]And all of this is imprinted through experiences one has as a very young child, namely that intimacy and warmth mean warmth and closeness.

[00:25:32]I don't want to go into that any further now, but this is the prototypical situation for telling the story, if one wants to talk about it.

[00:25:41]Then, in terms of exercise, the more often you do something, the more it sticks in your mind. So, using Haffer on the footpath is common practice. And the special thing is that the more often they do something, the easier it is for them to recall these cognitive structures.

[00:26:04]And narratives are of particular interest in this regard, because they not only provide narrative material and a plot, but also reveal knowledge of their own culture and tradition.

[00:26:20]As you may know, the Old Testament is a book of history and laws, quite essentially.

[00:26:28]And it's not as if you could recite the Old Testament from memory at first glance, once you've seen it in front of you. You have to practice a bit, especially to make sure you use the correct wording. That's not so easy at all.

[00:26:45]Um, but of course there are storytelling traditions in which that is precisely the purpose of passing on culture and knowledge. And the entire Old Testament, that is, above all the Creation, Genesis and the Exodus, is full of stories.

[00:27:01]The only thing that matters is telling them the story of the Jewish people, who supposedly took 40 years to get from Egypt to Jerusalem, for example.

[00:27:14]And this enchantment happens through repetition, the same thing over and over again.

[00:27:21]There are also meditation cultures in Asia where you shouldn't ask why you perform an action a thousand times, but rather the answer is: do it a thousand times, then we'll see. There is also this appalling practice in schools of punishing students by making them repeatedly copy work. From a cognitive linguistics perspective, this is unfortunately the best way to learn.

[00:27:42]So, you just need to frame it a little more positively. Yes, but from a didactic point of view, that's a difficult principle to work out, I'll be honest.

[00:27:53]I'll do the next categorization very quickly. They can usually distinguish between good and bad stories by the fact that they know pretty much exactly what the plot is about.

[00:28:02]So, if I ask her what a typical villain is in a fairy tale, a typical antagonist, she might say things like a witch or the stepmother.

[00:28:14]Well, I don't want to let this drift into the myogenic discourse, yes, but anyway, in classic German culture, the mother-in-law really always has a tough time, let's put it that way. Yes, and the parallels between witches and mothers-in-law are very close.

[00:28:31]And indeed, that is of course an issue, isn't it? So that means that in German-language fairy tales, they primarily have female characters as problematic figures, or dwarf giants and trolls, which don't even exist. Um, it's always a bit problematic because, of course, social interaction also influences the middle social interaction in a certain way, and above all, it names a narrative tradition, a cultural tradition, from which we and these stories come.

[00:29:02]Then perspective. They can tell stories from a very different perspective, and above all from a very different narrative point of view, thus giving the construction of reality a completely different coloring. Think about the current debates surrounding Vornam Horus Street and the role of the Iran war, who is telling which stories about what is actually happening there, and you keep thinking, can't we at some point bring this together into some kind of discourse based on facts, where we can at least agree on two or three points and not, uh, tell a different story about what is actually happening on every side of the world?

[00:29:39]But that's what stories can usually do. Precisely these things enable the construction of different perspectives on reality. And that is a central principle of cognitive linguistics. So, that means you can go through every element of cognitive linguistics in the narratives and say: "Great, uh, ideal subject."

[00:30:03]Then there is metaphorization, one of the central aspects within cognitive linguistics, which assumes that we can all only ever live in metaphors and that most of our understanding of the world comes from metaphors. This does n't include the big things, like freedom, love, and happiness being light, but above all things like my life is a journey or my life is a path I'm walking, perhaps together with another person, or that Pentecost is approaching us at the moment, there's nothing coming, yes, but that's a metaphor for the passage of time.

[00:30:49]on which a spatial constitution is effectively attached, and our texts are full of it. Narratives are also full of them, because they have to take a position. You need to take a perspective and then adapt the whole thing accordingly. That's what's meant here.

[00:31:07]So, where is all this leading?

[00:31:10]If we consider these as such basic premises, the next step is that cognitive construction grammar builds on this with the so -called concept of construction and says that we cannot only describe forms in linguistic structures, but we must also always include their meaning and functions in order to actually talk about something like a linguistic pattern. And if this linguistic pattern has meaning and a formal function, we can understand it as a construction. And these constructions are related to each other and form a so-called constructicon. So that means they mutually influence each other and, um, can be thought of in different mental representations. The extent of this concept of construction is not yet fully discussed.

[00:32:01]El Goldburg speaks of so-called grammatical construction, meaning the construction up to the end of the sentence.

[00:32:08]There are other approaches in construction grammar that say we are also talking about linguistic patterns that go beyond this. This means that they may become relevant in terms of text linguistics or argumentation, to the point that entire narratives and narrative patterns can be constructs. That would be, for example, what only Bubenhofer does with his birth reports; he does n't use the term "construction," but one could theoretically say that his birth reports form the template for a " construction birth report."

[00:32:38]But I don't want to delve into the research-related aspects of text linguistics now, but I just want to suggest that one could also consider fairy tales in their specific form. There is, after all, the publication from structuralism on the simple forms of storytelling, which gives the impression that we have a fixed narrative pattern here, and we learn it in a conventionalized way, and then we can also tell a fairy tale.

[00:33:03]The concept of construction may extend that far.

[00:33:06]But I won't go into that today.

[00:33:10]Anyway, and that's the interesting part. Therefore, to emphasize again here, construction grammar assumes that we don't just have a fixed set of rules that we can combine in some way. So, we have something like a web object and then a predicate in between, and that is a noun and that is a verb and that is another N in the accusative case, but one assumes that, for example, we also have such a constructive status with solidified multi-word units, like "it was once upon a time," because that's how you recognize fairy tales, or if they haven't died, then they're still alive today would be another example. They probably use it relatively rarely in everyday life; I don't know when they last went out on the street and said it, but at the same time, it's typical for certain forms of storytelling. So, that means they have a certain, one could say, prototypicality; this pattern is characteristic of a certain form of certain narratives, where everyone already knows what will come next. If you begin a story with " once upon a time," it's presumably not about the launch of the next SpaceX rocket to the moon.

[00:34:28]Yes, but that means there are already constructions of reality, areas that are excluded from such stories, while there are other stories in which one can, of course, tell about certain current events.

[00:34:43]And construction grammar can unlock these connections better than, uh, a traditional functional grammar that deals with parts of speech and says, uh, here we would like a word-formation device and this is the div, this is the compound, these are the sentence elements, then we do a sentence-song analysis from it and then we say, now it's finished.

[00:35:05]So now you have conducted a chakra analysis. You did a great job. But what use it is, I have no idea.

[00:35:13]And the offering of cognitive construction grammar is that we use the recognition of these patterns to explain why certain grammatical structures are particularly important, for example to explain stories, i.e., to explain why fairy tales work in a particular way.

[00:35:33]And believe me, even children understand that.

[00:35:37]And that can be the approach to bringing grammar into school lessons, by showing exactly that.

[00:35:43]I don't want to look too far ahead to next week. Construction grammar didactics, which focuses on implementing construction grammar in teaching contexts, starts precisely from this observation. That is, we are looking at the question of which patterns we can quantitatively identify in narratives that attract particular grammatical attention, and we are taking these as the subject for our school lessons.

[00:36:10]So, we no longer teach the template, er, sentence element identification, but we look at the special construction of subordinate clauses with justification structures in texts where justifications are involved.

[00:36:26]Yes, that means where one says, okay, these are constitutive for this form of text, so that one can look at them more closely in context.

[00:36:37]I'm only showing you this now for the sake of formality. This is what they can look like. You can forget about it immediately. Exactly.

[00:36:46]Shock, severe distress. Um, the point is that we naturally—and I just want to illustrate this— think about the different levels on which constructions interlock, so that different levels can also be found in narratives. Perhaps to summarize very briefly, if one considers the whole thing, one will come to the conclusion that construction grammar or cognitive construction grammar understands and describes linguistically.

[00:37:13]Felke Feilke once spoke here of language as a form, of linguistic patterns as a form phenomenon.

[00:37:21]Language acquisition and language use are linked back to basic pumpkin experiences. Body language is not innate, but is learned. Language knowledge emerges from use. That is, it would be the entrenchment principle.

[00:37:36]Language knowledge is categorized and schematized.

[00:37:40]Language knowledge is culturally stabilized and passed on, becoming conventionalized.

[00:37:44]And there you see the narrative immediately in its right. You can always go through one point at a time, you can say, okay, what do narratives contribute to this? And they will always find that these are somehow prototypical for this context.

[00:37:58]All linguistic units are conceptual units consisting of meaning and form, i.e., constructions. You can ask yourself this: if you were to read a story to a four-year-old child and it was about a witch... Do you think the child has any idea what a witch is?

[00:38:18]So, where the witch is, who she is, where they live, what they do all day, what is typical for a witch character, if language knowledge were innate, yes, and one simply learns the lexicon through input, the child should know it.

[00:38:45]I would venture to say that the child learns a great deal about what a witch is from the story you are currently telling.

[00:38:54]If you don't read Russian fairy tales with Baba Agar as the witch, then the Central European witch does n't live in a house with a chicken leg for a foot, but rather the Central European, the prototypical Central European witch should preferably live in a gingerbread house.

[00:39:14]Yeah, just, right? So, that means it's like this, or you can imagine it, or you can even try it by hand on the weekend, what you think belongs in a witch 's house, what kind of utensils are in this witch's house. Yes, and then we can compare them to see if our general knowledge is somehow consistent. But they can do that with children, right?

[00:39:37]You can do it with children, it's very nice, please describe the inside of a witch's house. So, what kind of equipment is included?

[00:39:46]Then the structures that naturally arise here are all related to each other. You can do that in a constructicon, without going too far into construction grammar. Um, the cast of characters in, for example, a fairy tale is in such a relationship. That means if a witch appears in any text, a prince and a princess or something else, or an animal that speaks, will certainly appear. And um, that means, as you can already see, there are some kind of networks that you can't just uh, put aside, and they aren't simply listed somewhere in the lexicon and then assigned according to rules, but rather they have closer ties to each other.

[00:40:29]Construction grammar happened in language use, so we look at language use. Cognitive grammar that transparently reveals the principles of its modeling. And that 's the difference to a typical school grammar. So what I'm doing for you right now is actually explaining the premises and principles on which we would like to introduce a construction grammar based on narratives into school lessons.

[00:40:54]That's not in the educational standards.

[00:40:57]Not a single sentence about it. It doesn't say why it's good for children to learn parts of speech. It is a very simple question, and neither the educational standards nor the curriculum provide an answer to it.

[00:41:11]It simply states that they must be able to do it.

[00:41:14]That is a very, I don't know, very unfavorable motivation.

[00:41:20]Therefore, they can hardly get excited about it. That's why most people hate grammar lessons, because they do grammar exercises without rhyme or reason, only for the purpose of somehow mastering it and doing it correctly.

[00:41:41]Okay, if you go back to the beginning – and this is important for you to know – the discussion in cognitive linguistics goes back to the 1970s as an alternative to so-called generative grammar, and these two schools or paradigms are ultimately unfairly interchangeable.

[00:42:09]So, generative grammar, which uh, assumes that knowledge of language is innate. So, you may have heard of the so-called universal grammar; um, cognitive linguistics assumes that language is not innate, and with that you can actually end the discussion. So, that's a bit of a long shot, and generative grammar is fundamentally not usage-based.

[00:42:36]In recent years, efforts have been made to catch up by working in a usage-based manner, but this does not change the initial premise of whether language knowledge is innate or not.

[00:42:48]What cognitive grammar or linguistics attempts to do, however, is to avoid strictly separating syntactic knowledge and knowledge of other languages—as you can see at the very top—phonology, morphology, semantics, as modules. So they also come from linguistic introductions, they do phonetics from phonology, then they do morphology, then they do syntax and then semantics.

[00:43:13]And the whole thing is presented to him in individual bites, as if it weren't somehow connected.

[00:43:21]And this principle continues in schools as well.

[00:43:25]Cognitive linguistics would assume that everything is interconnected. You cannot separate one from the other, because each is always meaningful and formative for the other.

[00:43:39]If they don't have a fleunication, as in German or English, they need a different structure to accommodate the whole thing. They then need something like a morphosyntax that puts everything in order.

[00:43:49]They may only be able to identify the word by its specific pronunciation and intonation.

[00:43:58]These are all phenomena that can only be determined holistically and not in isolation. I think I shared that in the Matrix with the one I shared that with the one of the two no It's because the pronunciation of English words. I might share this again here in the lecture. That's exactly the point. You simply cannot describe it in isolation from language history, development, and semantics.

[00:44:23]OK. Um, let's get back to the story. I would ask her, um, to briefly identify one striking difference that distinguishes this story from the story from 14 days ago.

[00:44:43]So, you might remember, it was about, um, kids, a pros version of "clothes make the man."

[00:44:51]Um, exactly. One difference can be identified that is shown in the text here. A little more complex.

[00:45:14]What does it depend on? What is what is such a What would be here. Is anything at least conspicuous here?

[00:45:23]Yes, we say, speech, real speech is embedded.

[00:45:28]Um, that's at least what, uh, is the contribution of constructive speech to a text in your opinion?

[00:45:36]What it achieves is, well, emotionalization, situational awareness, and somehow also a change of perspective.

[00:45:45]Yes, different people are speaking, and this is associated with a change in tense throughout the story, from preterite to present tense. She probably didn't notice this when she read it aloud earlier, but in fact the text switches very abruptly between the past tense and the present tense. And you can look on the second page at, um, " fine Ahnis Plätzchen" in the first paragraph; there you have the tense change practically every two to three words. This story differs massively from the story you've already heard. And the change in tense is hinted at a point that is quite interesting in terms of metaphor, namely at the end of the first page; I'll briefly read the sentence to you. Above them, an eerily large black castle towered into the clouds, like an evil hawk hovering over a frightened flock of chickens.

[00:46:51]If you are looking for a place for metaphorization, here is one.

[00:46:55]And the difference in tense changes actually happens here for the first time, from past tense to present tense, and it's not about situation, change of perspective, or any kind of emotionalization, but rather the tense, the change of tense, is used here to move from a narrative stance to a generalizing representation, as is always the case. Yes, and this generalizing description is usually put in the present tense.

[00:47:27]That is, with just these two observations you have two functions of the present tense as opposed to the preterite tense on one and a half pages that you can explain why this is relevant in the context.

[00:47:39]It makes absolutely no sense to assume that one can say, uh, let's put this in the category of Tempos and then teach Tempos without a narrative in the background.

[00:47:50]I don't understand why he does n't do it differently.

[00:47:56]But I would like to show you two or three things that cognitive linguistics actually works with.

[00:48:01]The central principles are those that can be immediately incorporated into the analysis, um, if it's in the direction of a construction grammar work.

[00:48:08]The first thing is, they had, we had, the premise of perspective.

[00:48:15]In cognitive linguistics, this is discussed under the so-called questions of viewpoint and direction of view, which are prescribed to you in a narrative because you cannot influence the viewpoints.

[00:48:31]This means that your point of view is always that of the narrator, and this narrator dictates what you see and what you do not see. to see that the section of the object being perceived, so if I look at the wing from here, for example, I see the back of the wing in close-up.

[00:48:49]This all corresponds to their perception of reality in the world.

[00:48:54]That's why the narrative perspective feels so incredibly close to him. They only see what the narrator tells them, that is, they only hear what the narrator tells them, nothing more.

[00:49:05]And that's from his point of view, which does n't surprise her, but unfortunately it makes the narrative susceptible to manipulation, right? So, this is the core of the whole thing, and he not only directs her gaze, but he also determines from where and from which direction she looks, at which event. Take a look at the second paragraph. It's about a market woman who somehow puts the, um, uh, the pennies on the counter. " And look, this paragraph has something to do with buying cookies," the woman grumbled, "I only have 25 pfennigs." Inge took them out of her bag and placed them on the market woman's counter.

[00:49:53]So, there is an actual speech. They do n't yet know who spoke.

[00:49:59]Then it is shown who is speaking, namely the market woman.

[00:50:06]And that is called, uh, look at this overview, the relationship between primary and secondary focus.

[00:50:13]Therefore, the primary focus of the trajectory is directed towards what is being said, and only then towards the landmark. to the speaker. So, in effect, it reverses the expected perspective. You would normally say, yes, first speaker, then what is said, but the dynamic here arises from the fact that people are talking to each other and the focus is first on what is said and then on the speaker.

[00:50:42]This is quite exciting, and it sets in motion a certain dynamic that demands the full attention of the reader and listener, because it runs counter to the normal perspective they are usually familiar with.

[00:51:01]And thus, you have made the principle of direct speech, if you will, much more plausible through a very simple cognitive principle than if you say, yes, that's just direct speech, we need quotation marks for it.

[00:51:13]That's what orthography would say, right? She had nothing more to contribute.

[00:51:17]But you can ask, where exactly does this cognitive-linguistic momentum about the perspectival performance become directly visible in the grammatical structure?

[00:51:31]The second thing you see, Inge replies, I still have 25 pfennigs.

[00:51:36]You know from your worldly knowledge that it's not just the market woman who will say that, yes, but there is another speaker who is speaking now, and you also know who that is. That's Inge, and nothing is said there about who is speaking.

[00:51:51]Inge is not identified as the speaker; instead, she retrieves these 25 pfennigs and places them on the table, thus more or less connecting what was said with the subsequent action. And since there is a syntactic parallel, i.e., between Mark and Inge, which follow directly after the "uh" after what was said, you can in turn connect them to what was said.

[00:52:15]But they shouldn't be allowed to investigate, because that's a strange sentence. Yes. Inge doesn't appear in the sentence, not even through connection.

[00:52:29]OK. Um, and the sentence Inge took it out of her bag and placed it on the market vendor's counter. This one's something else. He seems so unassuming, he comes across so inconspicuous. He has, um, he really has a, uh, uh, I'll show you later, he has something inside him. But you can look at how her gaze actually moves from moment to moment during the sentence "Inge took them out of her bag and placed them on the market woman's counter".

[00:53:01]So they watch the girl as she puts her hand in her pocket, then takes out the money and places it on the counter behind which the market woman is standing. So, there are very few such beautiful examples of this perspective guidance. So, they can actually follow along step by step.

[00:53:20]The next Action Chain fits right in here. Yes, exactly. The question is, what is the relationship between which agent is acting and what exactly is being done at this moment, and who is being treated?

[00:53:36]This example is also very nice, isn't it? So, it means you see two people speaking and one person acting on that. And you will gradually see this sequence of actions unfold, with the specific function of the "us" that it connects these chains of action together in narratives.

[00:54:00]Then perspective, you see, this is real, this goes through one after the other now. Uh, Tjekor and Landmark, so it's mostly associated with the concept of agency. So that means they will attribute to Inge the fact that Inge is alive. Therefore, they are alive, a living entity that can act. So that means she can take money out of her pocket and put it down.

[00:54:27]Um, what made you so sure she was alive?

[00:54:31]So, that it's agentic?

[00:54:37]She does things, she acts, she can walk and talk, for example. Yes, she obviously has hands and feet, and then there was the small picture in front of it, and the picture shows Inge walking along a path with the little one, one of the wizard students.

[00:55:01]The text nowhere stated that the person in the picture is Inge; rather, they inferred this fact from the reception of the narrative. That will probably be Inge in her dress, and I say, okay, she can act, she can be a bad guy. And they draw these conclusions without this being explicitly stated in the story. This is part of their general knowledge, something they have learned along the way.

[00:55:22]That is, this is how they structure their language. That's why the agent, who usually acts, is at the beginning and not at the end of a sentence. Which in turn completely reverses the action chain in direct speech. Yes, that means that's the momentum being created here. Okay, and now it gets interesting, I do n't know if you've ever seen these before, the so-called Deep Cases from Filmor, whether that means anything to you. Semantic roles. Have you ever heard of that?

[00:55:52]No. OK.

[00:55:55]Filmo's idea is that there is a so-called case grammar or deep grammar, i.e., with semantic roles or semantic depths that lie beneath the surface, the linguistic surface.

[00:56:10]That means they may have learned in school and university that there are things like subject, predicate, object, right? And then you usually have this, uh, with the subject, it's like, those who act and do things, and they act and they do things, if you describe a subject like that, it's actually already wrong.

[00:56:32]A subject occupies a specific position in the sentence and is formally a nominative noun. Point.

[00:56:40]That is a subject and it reacts to the verb or conjures with the verb regarding, uh, number, uh, yes, number, that's it then.

[00:56:57]But there's nothing there, so "subject" does n't mean it's animate, nor does "object" mean it's animate; rather, these are additional pieces of information that are added in this way, which actually have nothing to do with the determination of the subject. School grammar simply lacks the vocabulary to describe what is actually happening.

[00:57:16]In German, it is very common for the subject function in the deep case to correspond to the agent, namely someone who acts, who is basically alive and capable of action.

[00:57:35]Um, the examples you see are not from the story with the land and letters, but from Snow White.

[00:57:48]You can consider whether you would have understood the girl, whether you would have understood the fairy tale, if you had only read the example sentences. And then ask yourself why?

[00:57:57]So, that means, um, we have agentive actions that can correlate with subject position, they do n't have to like in the passive voice, but they can.

[00:58:06]Experiencer is the semantic role that applies when someone experiences something about themselves, especially psychological experiences. I remembered last summer, that would be a case like that, wouldn't it?

[00:58:19]Then we have the instrument, that is, the purpose or the means by which something happens.

[00:58:26]The object, that is, the thing to which something happens, the item, alongside the source, the goal, the place, the time and path. These are things they usually dismiss as adverbial clauses.

[00:58:42]And the special thing is that this action chain and these deep cases very often correlate with the concepts of object and predicate known in functional grammar, which they don't need for anything at all.

[00:59:00]So, they don't need the subject and object concepts if they know that an agent is encoded there.

[00:59:09]And also, you can take a look at the instrument; she pricked herself with the needle.

[00:59:15]The most frequent linguistic elements that we would categorize as instruments are no longer marked with the dative case or with the instrumental case in German. In Latin and Indo-European languages, there is a chaos that is grammatically coded in such a way that it can be identified as a means, but because these cases have been reduced in German, and we only have four cases left, we are left with only one prepositional phrase to realize with it.

[00:59:53]So, in the course of language history, we lose the inflectional changes and effectively replace the omitted instrumental with a prepositional phrase resulting in corresponding chaos.

[01:00:05]With the needle is Date.

[01:00:09]Yes, so pretty much all the other cases fall under the dative case. So, vocative, lucative, um, instrumental.

[01:00:19]And thus, they essentially express a purpose. With this alone, they can not only explain an entire history of language, but they can also explain what prepositions actually do, by suggesting exactly that.

[01:00:36]And, among other things, the object is used as an instrument; the concept of the object is actually very, very broad.

[01:00:43]Essentially, it's just about describing the target action more precisely.

[01:00:49]And this list set is even more extensively developed in the semantic roles of Peter von Pullin, which also offers other approaches and goes in the direction of frame semantics. Um, I don't know if I want to touch on that in this lecture. The first thing to take away, however, is that it may be much more practical to work with such a set of semantic roles in schools than with a concept of subject, predicate and object.

[01:01:17]Why? Because you still have to describe their shape. Well, that's inevitable. But I can, for example, explain why "I go home" and " I come to you" are systematically similar, because they describe a goal and this goal can be realized in different ways linguistically.

[01:01:39]I can also say, I'm coming, and I'm coming, and I'm coming home.

[01:01:44]They have the same function, yes, namely to represent a goal, but in different varieties using different linguistic means.

[01:01:55]And learning grammatical forms through this context is much more productive than saying, look, that's a nice preposition.

[01:02:08]Um, I'll just show you this very briefly here. These are the so-called degrees of agency. So, if we ask ourselves, how long is an Argens alive for us? So, when and for how long can he trade? What are the minimum standards? So what qualities must an agent possess in order to be able to act at all? And this role is very old. This is from 91 by Daai. And I'll just look at the top four, five areas. So, an Argen is someone who is involved in an event. That means he has to be there intentionally.

[01:02:49]Therefore, the intentional intent must be recognizable. So if Inge takes the money out of her pocket, you can assume that's what she wants.

[01:02:57]The next thing... um, someone needs to be able to find out something. So someone has to be afraid, right? That means it would be the experiencer function, and if someone can feel fear, they can also act. Then cause an event, yes, or involve someone, more or less, in an action. You might think of something like an avalanche. An avalanche has buried 27 people. Yes, you wouldn't say that the avalanche is alive and can experience anxiety in itself, but it can move and thus influence others. This gives it a graded form of agency, but we'll still say, yes, it still does something on its own, or the wind propels the ship forward, for example, right?

[01:03:50]So, it would also be a kind of, um, observation. The next thing, um, it simply moves from A to B, and with that you would think, well, like those bales of straw in those typical American Western films that roll through the camera once.

[01:04:12]They would probably agree, perhaps it was the wind, but that means they can check for themselves whether it already has agency status for them or not.

[01:04:20]Yes, but anyway, when a ball rolls, that's exactly what you observe, the movement; you don't know where it comes from. Um, okay. Exactly. And the last thing is that all of this exists without the, um, uh, semantics that are brought along by advertising. This is still enclosed in brackets here. So this is just an attempt to describe it, but just so you can see it. Um, and I would like to draw your attention to the second-to-last sentence.

[01:04:49]We are in the land without letters, and the chief wizard makes sure that no letters enter the land.

[01:04:58]Um, yes, the question here would be: do the letters have agentivity status?

[01:05:07]Yes or no.

[01:05:10]The letters are arriving in the country. It 's a very typical structure. Action Chain. Yes, so we have something, uh, an entity, then we have a verb that expresses movement, and we even have a goal. So letters are coming to the country.

[01:05:29]I'll leave you with that question for now, because in fact, what you need next depends not only on the action chain or the assessment of whether someone is dangerous for you or not, but also on advertising semantics. So what else could this mean besides someone actually coming actively? It can also indicate a process, and then you are in the right place here. Letters themselves are of course in subject position, but their agentivity status is quite doubtful, and perhaps the letters do not come alone, but perhaps someone brings letters to whom you assign agentivity status because your world knowledge tells you that there are no letters that walk alone or travel by train.

[01:06:22]But they might be in the book that someone is carrying.

[01:06:25]That means they need a lot of explanations that are necessary to explain the agentivity status of letters.

[01:06:32]And then you might find that "letters" here stands in a metonymic relationship to a person who carries letters with them.

[01:06:42]And they can use this example to explain metaphor and metaphor.

[01:06:46]So that means, no matter what they do, if they look at the whole thing cognitively and grammatically, they are pretty far along, because they can then explain all these connections in history well against the background of world knowledge. Finally, let me show you two things.

[01:07:04]Um, I'll say right away that this will hardly play a role in the lecture anymore.

[01:07:08]This is the internal structure and construction. That's why we need to look towards foreign medicine. And I would just like to give you a typical example of a double object or transfer construction, depending on which direction you are describing the whole thing from. They all know, okay, there's someone who gives something, there's someone who receives something, and then there has to be something else that's handed over.

[01:07:32]So, the classic structure. And you see that in Framenet, which is why it is now important to spell out these semantic roles, language usage is happening. That is, in Framenet, one describes what form these semantic roles can take in language use and describes them from the perspective of language use.

[01:07:56]And you see above these, uh, theoretically modeled, uh, semantic roles, and at the same time below in the construction frame, which frame semantic counterparts these assume there. Yes, so in the case of giving, the agent is a typical giver.

[01:08:19]In the case of giving, the benefactive is a recipient, and the object is not just an object, but the object that is transferred.

[01:08:32]This is the function here, and you can explain it to children really well, because this is how they learn language. These are the advertising island structures by Thomas Sello that you see here. And that means the children effectively learn these patterns, these roles, from certain actions that they observe and perform themselves.

[01:08:52]This means that the topic of language acquisition is of particular interest in this context. And I show her the sentence with Inge again, and there's a problem here.

[01:09:04]Inge placed the pennies on the market woman's counter.

[01:09:09]If you like, there's a frame that, uh, takes care of the placement.

[01:09:17]Yes, so that means, and for this placing, "to place" is a prototypical verb.

[01:09:23]So, there is a placer, there is, um, in our case, a free element in this frame, the beneficiary of the market woman, something placed. And what is no longer shown in this frame is the place where something is placed. This is relevant for placing frames.

[01:09:47]So you can say that two things happen in this sentence.

[01:09:53]The frame of placing and the frame of giving are blended together. I have chosen to use the frame of giving in this presentation, but this is not yet solved, at least theoretically. So Inge can put the pennies on the table, and Inge can put the money on the table for the market woman. In one case, "auf den Tisch" would be a simple local adverbial indicating the location and placing the emphasis on the act of giving.

[01:10:27]Yes, as outlined here.

[01:10:29]When placing something, that wouldn't be the point; the act of giving would play a subordinate role. And they can ask themselves what is more relevant to the sentence from their perspective: the act of placing it on the table or the act of giving it.

[01:10:44]And depending on what they choose, they have to assume different embedding ratios for these frames and different fillings for these rolls, because it's no longer about placing, but about giving.

[01:10:58]OK?

[01:11:03]If we look at the whole thing from a constructional perspective, the question is, when we look at narratives, are the constructions we are looking at constitutive for the stories, i.e., do they only exist because the story exists, or do they contribute a central function to understanding the narratives?

[01:11:29]So, these are the central questions that a construction grammar would ask itself, and above all, these questions would be considered in the context of what grammar is in schools. And next week I would like to look towards construction didactics, namely with the question of how we can teach the whole thing in an empirically based way in, um, the school context.

[01:11:57]But I can already say that we will continue to work on the topic of stories. Um, maybe that's it for today. Um, we have a few more minutes for the exchange. For those watching from outside, thank you for your attention. Um, I would very much like to elaborate on two or three examples here and there, but I don't know if I'll do anything more with the country or letters. Actually, it 's a sweet story, yes, and it also fits in with school in some way, and I can certainly imagine that it's useful for teaching grammar, given that we've already seen that these are very complex constructions that play a role. um, it is very, very well suited, and above all, the text is from 1958, meaning it follows a completely different spelling and punctuation. Um, you may have noticed that in the direct quotes as well.

[01:12:55]According to Duden, these would be implemented differently today, namely with commas throughout. And indeed, this can also be used to show how punctuation rules change within 60 or 70 years. Although they still understand why it is meant, it would be easy to correct this text according to today's valid orthographic rules. Yes, that would certainly be a worthwhile task in our field. So. Um, the lecture will take place next week, even though we have Ascension Day on Thursday. Um, I won't miss those. And if they, I'll say it very carefully, if you're in the stream, um, or if they're here, we'll see. Um, I'll let myself be surprised. I'm definitely here. And thank you very much for your attention and see you next week.

[01:13:51]So.