Marta Dimitrijevic
Marta Dimitrijevic
Marta Dimitrijevic
1. Introduction
Although some authors have tried to make the case that incorrect article
use, or even the lack thereof, does not completely impede communication, proper
reference resolution is an important precondition for successful communication.
Just like with any other grammatical category, all the necessary effort should
be made for English articles to be used properly, especially among non-native
speakers of English who strive to achieve the coveted level of proficiency. In terms
of how reference is realized, it relies heavily on collaboration inference, that is, the
listener must be willing to correctly infer what it was that the speaker intended
to identify. Assumptions are made on both sides, in terms of the availability and
access to the referent in question. The English language can boast of a variety
of referring expressions, such as demonstratives, pronouns, and most important
for this overview, definite NPs or the definite article in particular. The situation
would not hold much significance for us were there a one-to-one correspondence
between referring expressions in English and in Serbian. However, problems
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ensue from the fact that not only does the English language contain an article
system, while there is no article system in Serbian, and thus no definite article,
but the definite article in English also codes definiteness, while Serbian has been
identified as coding specificity (Trenkić, 2002; 2004; 2007; 2009).
Thus, instruction on article use is a necessary part of the EFL process. This
does not vary, irrespective of the L1 of the students in question. So far, what will
be referred to as the ‘traditional’ approach to teaching the definite article has
been based on explicit instruction which exploited the main components of
definiteness: familiarity (subsumed under identifiability, Christophersen, 1939)
and uniqueness (a special case of inclusiveness, Lyons, 1999; Russell, 1905; Huong,
2005).
The textbooks used as aids during the instruction process focus on
familiarity, as evident in the second/prior mention rule for the use of the definite
article, and unique identifiability (Gundel et al., 1993 inter alia) as a necessary and
sufficient condition for the use of the. However, it remains to be seen whether this
has proven to be the best possible approach, considering that errors in article
use persist even among proficient learners of English from a variety of linguistic
backgrounds. Still, unique identifiability has widely been accepted as the standard
in many cases of the use of the, sometimes explicitly and sometimes less so.
Adopted here for the purpose of this overview is Huong’s succinct explanation of
what unique identifiability (to the speaker and hearer) is:
“A noun is used in a definite sense when both the Speaker and Hearer (or writer and
reader) know exactly which one(s) is/are meant. In other words, when a Speaker
thinks that the Hearer can identify it as unique or as the only ones, he/she will mark
a common noun with the definite article” (Huong, 2005: 160).
Could the aforementioned persistence in the number of errors be
eradicated with a change in the approach taken? It would appear that finding a
new framework within which to conduct research and instruct various learners of
English would be a worthwhile endeavor. Some, such as Verspoor & Huong (2008)
have already made the initial steps, explaining that a cognitive approach might
help students acquire the English article system by becoming aware of what is
actually meant with each individual form.
The aim is to enable the EFL students to understand the conceptualization
involved in article use. “The hypothesis is that once they understand the over-
arching principles, students may realize what is actually meant with the forms
and recognize the meaningful relationships between the different uses of a
particular form. The advantage of such a CL approach to teaching language is
that it helps raise awareness of form-meaning connections, and that once an L2
learner recognizes these connections, he or she may be better able to recognize,
remember and apply them” (Verspoor, forthcoming).
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with it” (1991: 307). Thus, a referent is rendered definite by virtue of the speaker’s
construal of a particular situation. Huong (2005) restated this by stating that
we rely on construal to emphasize the use of articles as clues to help signal the
speaker’s construal of the status of information in the ongoing discourse and
to indicate whether the speaker conceptualizes an entity as being bounded or
unbounded. Definiteness also indicates that “the Speaker and Addressee have
established ‘mental contact’ for the ‘referent of an instance’” (Langacker, 1991:
91), and could be said to reside in part on the establishment of joint attention
involving the speaker and hearer involved in a particular situation, proving that
they are both thinking of the same referent.
Construal is the cognitive linguistic concept referring to the fact that as
humans, we are able to view the same situation in a variety of different ways,
and ascribe different interpretations to them.
“Learning language involves determining structure from usage and this, like
learning about all other aspects of the world, involves the full scope of cognition:
the remembering of utterances and episodes, the categorization of experience,
the determination of patterns among and between stimuli, the generalization
of conceptual schema and prototypes from exemplars, and the use of cognitive
models, of metaphors, analogies, and images in thinking. Language is used to
focus the listener’s attention to the world; it can foreground different elements
in the theatre of consciousness to potentially relate many different stories and
perspectives about the same scene.” (Robinson & Ellis, 2008: 3)
Our varying construals are reflected in the choice of words we use to signal
them, including varying referring expressions. This notion is closely related to
the concept of boundedness. The latter refers to the setting up of any clearly
delineated boundaries of a particular referent, mainly referring to whether or not
we perceive something to be uncountable or not. Although it may, on the surface
seem like a clear-cut concept, problems do tend to arise in situations when what
is typically considered a count noun is used as a non-count one and vice versa
(paper for example).
When it comes to the concept of grounding: “… a nominal or a finite
clause has the discourse-related role of singling out an instance of the thing or
process type and specifying its relation to the ground (the speech event and its
participants) […] For a nominal, grounding elements include the demonstratives,
the articles, and certain quantifiers.” (Langacker, 2000: 271). This emphasizes the
importance that context plays in the determination of article use.
Finally, we come to boundedness. “A fundamental distinction between
count and mass nouns depends on whether the profiled region is construed as
being bounded within the scope of predication in its domain of instantiation. For
physical substances, the domain of instantiation is generally space. Lake is thus
a count noun because it designates a limited body of water whose boundaries
are specifically included in the scope of predication (i.e. they are inherent to the
conception of a lake). By contrast, water is a mass noun.” (1991: 18, original bold).
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2. ALTERNATIVE VIEWS
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take this shift in point of view in account is one of the main factors that hinder the
proper use of the definite article among L1 Serbian/L2 English speakers.
First of all, there is the opening sentence of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains.” In this example we are asked to adopt
the viewpoint of the narrator, who is at the same time the main protagonist. All
of the definite descriptions are indicators of his point of view, inviting us into his
environment, as he perceives it as the time.
I devised Sierra Madre resident Andy Dotson might not have needed to breach
security barricades to return to his threatened home. He had forgotten his tattered,
19-year-old blanket with the distinctive penguin design. ‘‘The kids and the animals
are my security blanket, they come first’’, he said. ‘‘But my family didn’t get [the
blanket], so I went back there. It means something to me. I was gonna bust through
the barricades if I had to _ (Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1993, p. A10)
This is another example of a shift to a noncanonical point of view, that of a third
person. In the first example, we might even claim that the interpretation was made
easier for us due to the fact that we as the reader were asked to adopt a new point
of view from the very beginning of the text. In this case however, we determine that
these shifts can occur mid-text, not to mention mid-sentence as well.
1
This is also related to the concepts of “boundedness” and “construal”.
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noun (i.e. there is no need for EFL learners to continuously question themselves
about whether what they are dealing with is a CSg, CPl or UC noun) in question or
the syntactic structure of the sentence within which we find the noun in question
(i.e. whether there is any modification that refers to that particular noun), all of
which would additionally tax the comprehension process.
Another important point made in this study was the fact that it answered
the question of the distinction between the specific and the generic, which is
often times posed in regard to article use. The author made a very good point
in saying that this type of distinction, when dealing with a cognitive grammar
approach to article use and instruction, is actually not necessary. In other words:
“When a noun phrase is definite, it is implied that it is also specific as a result
of the mental contact coordinated by the speaker and the hearer with a unique
instance of a type (Langacker, 1991: vol. 2) and can thus be ignored. Besides,
generic the is not that different from specific the and can be seen through the
difference between two notions: the physical domain of instantiation and the
abstract domain of instantiation […]. If the speaker and hearer coordinate mental
contact on one particular type as a whole, it can also be construed as uniquely
identified and therefore definite, but in this case implicitly generic. Therefore,
we feel it is warranted to use the notion of definiteness for both specific the and
generic the, the more because it keeps the schema as simple as possible” (2005:
153, original italics). Furthermore, Langacker stated that
“In fact, I devised the notion “mental contact” for the specific purpose of characterizing
the definite article, which – very roughly – indicates that the speaker and addressee
have each established mental contact with the same instance of the relevant nominal
class (which is specified by the remainder of the noun phrase).” (2000: 179).
It is important for us to mention that the results of the research carried out
by Huong did in fact show an improvement in the knowledge of article use in the
group of participants who were exposed to the more cognitive-grammar oriented
approach. The difference noted between the group that received a traditional
instruction and the ‘cognitive’ group was statistically significant. However, the
benefits reaped from this type of instruction were not long-lived and it soon came
to pass that on the second post-test, although the ‘cognitive’ group once again
outperformed the ‘traditional’ group, the difference was no longer statistically
significant. These results are however far from discouraging. They indicate the
need for a more consistent and persistent cognitive grammar based approach to
article instruction in the EFL classroom.
Based on the research carried out by Huong (2005) and Verspoor and Huong
(2008), Verspoor further developed the lessons designed as part of this research,
by including the use of visuals to help further improve the instruments used in the
instruction. The visuals were used with the intention of improving comprehension
and retention. They were meant to keep the instruction simple and to keep the
salient concepts clear. In addition to the inclusion of visuals, which could prove to
be of great importance for further article instruction, the second important point
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that was emphasized by Verspoor in her study was the fact that article instruction is
discourse-dependent. Many textbooks and course books seem to neglect this point
by offering individual sentences as illustrations of article use. However, without
recourse to a particular setting, a particular context to limit or establish any clear
boundaries, the use of the correct article could prove to be not more than a guessing
game, since these examples of nominal can often lack a grounding predication.
The results of the research carried out by Verspoor (forthcoming) indicate
that even though ultimately the participants displayed improvement in their
knowledge of article use, the learning process did not follow a straight, linear
path, but is full of ups and downs so to speak. For example, in her case study the
two participants first underwent a dip in their performance, after which they both
improved, one stabilizing at a higher level of proficiency and accuracy, the other
taking several other dips. Thus, any recorded improvement is a step in the right
direction but is by no means the end to our journey.
Visuals were also used by Dimitrijević (2010) who attempted to try and find
an alternative method for article instruction within the aforementioned theoretical
framework. The results offered a certain amount of proof that the figure/ground
distinction could be used as a starting point in the attempt to explain the use of
the definite article to learners of English as a foreign language. The results yielded
a statistically significant connection between the visual representation of the
figure/ground distinction and the use of the definite article (p=.000). These results
could serve as the basis for the further studies related to the relationship between
cognitive linguistics and the definite article in the SL classroom.
3. Conclusion
My primary goal was to try and bring together the work of several authors
regarding the use of the definite article as they relate to Cognitive Grammar,
with the hopes of being able to design a method which could be applied in the
L2 classroom. Considering the fact that in many languages, including Serbian,
no article system exists, the need for such a method, which could inspire more
native-like use of the definite article, might prove to be quite useful. If to this we
add that errors persist even at advanced levels of L2 English, it all indicates a need
for change in English article instruction.
Some of the work, although primarily theoretical in nature, has been very
helpful in identifying key concepts which could provide the basis for further
research: how we construe situations, the entities within them and how much
the speaker and hearer have to collaborate as a part of reference resolution. On
the other hand, the practical research projects have shown positive results and
can steer us in the right direction, whether we are replicating previous research
or starting our own. Further research will reveal whether a cognitive linguistic
approach will prove to a better choice for researchers and teachers alike.
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Marta Dimitrijević
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