Identification of prepositional constructions for pedagogical application in the teaching of Spanish as a second language

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Guided by Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Construction Grammar (CxG) approaches, my PhD project will investigate the formal and semantic features of an inventory of Spanish prepositional constructions (PC) in order to develop a pedagogical model for teaching prepositions to learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). Taking an interdisciplinary approach, combining usage-based and applied linguistics perspectives, this project seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the current inventory of PC used by Spanish speakers and how can their meanings be described and categorised? 2) How can CL and CxG be used to create an effective pedagogical model that facilitates the learning of PC? 3) What effects would a linguistically informed pedagogical model have in the acquisition of PC by Spanish language learners in comparison to other teaching modalities?Prepositions are an area widely recognised as challenging for language learners. Their heterogeneity and seemingly arbitrary nature make them difficult to classify and learn, and a common source of errors during speech production. In the process of learning an L2, students tend to rely on their mother tongue (L1), sometimes creating erroneous equivalences between linguistic structures in their L1 and structures in the L2, in a process called "transfer" (Kellerman, 1979; Ortega, 2008). This phenomenon has been identified in adult English-speaking learners of Spanish by Brogan and Son (2015), who attest that, although learners are increasingly exposed to input and improve their skill level, they continue misusing prepositions and erroneously associating them with prepositions in their L1.One aspect that may hinder the acquisition of prepositions is the way their meanings are presented in educational materials. Prepositions are often explained in unsystematic ways, with exhaustive but unrelated lists of uses and syntactic rules. One approach towards a more integrated view of prepositional forms and meanings is to incorporate the tenets of CL and CxG into the development of theory and materials for language learning. CL is a theoretical framework which proposes that the relationship between forms and meanings is not arbitrary but motivated and embodied, in other words, it emerges from the interaction between our bodies and the physical and sociocultural reality around us (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987, Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Cadierno, 2019). As a usage-based approach, CL also posits that the experience of using the language is what allows the speakers to build a grammar of the language (Langacker, 1987; Tomasello, 2000).For this research, I will use an approach derived from the CL framework, CxG - a theory grounded in the idea that language is composed of 'constructions', that is, pairings of form and meaning (Lakoff, 1987; Goldberg, 1995, 2013). Constructions constitute an innovative analytical tool not only for the description of the forms and meanings of prepositional structures but also for their instruction in the L2 classroom, as the notion of construction integrates lexical, grammatical, discursive and pragmatic values (Castañeda Castro, Cadierno & Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019), providing a holistic perspective that facilitates learning the multiple meanings of complex and seemingly unsystematic structures.