Aspect construal in Mandarin: a usage-based constructionist perspective on LE

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le, confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspect. We argue that le participates in two distinct family resemblance constructions of aspect construal associated with two distinct sentential positions. The clause-internal le construction construes the closing or final boundary of an event and the clause-final le construction construes the opening or initial boundary of an event. Corpus analysis showed that the two aspect constructions have distinct patterns in natural language uses that are consistent with the proposed construals. Results from elicited response data showed that native speakers paid attention to construction-level formal and semantic cues in making family resemblance judgments about tokens of the two constructions. This study has both theoretical and methodological implications for crosslinguistic research on grammatical aspect in relation to lexical aspect and for usage-based constructionist approaches to grammatical categories beyond aspect.

The study of valency is biased toward more frequent verbs: A corpus study of the valency of less frequent verbs in Czech

Theories of valency and valency dictionaries are inevitably and understandably based on the valency behavior of frequent verbs. This paper scrutinizes 154 low-frequency Czech verbs and argues that they demonstrate that Czech verbs are more malleable in their valency behavior than suggested by the literature. It is argued that this fits better within a constructionist approach to valency rather than a lexicalist one. Furthermore, the paper illustrates two alternations, previously unrecognized for Czech as semantic diatheses, namely the causative-inchoative alternation and the Agent-Means alternation.

Roles of verb and construction cues

This study investigates how speakers of English and Korean, two typologically distinct languages, derive information from a verb and a construction to achieve sentence comprehension. In a sentence-sorting task, we manipulated verb semantics (real versus nonce) in each language. The results showed that participants from both languages were less inclined to sort sentences by a verb cue when the lexical-semantic information about a verb was obscured (i.e., nonce verb). In addition, the Korean-speaking participants were less likely affected by the verb semantics conditions than the English-speaking participants. These findings suggest the role of an argument structure construction in sentence comprehension as a co-contributor of sentence meaning, supporting the constructionist approach. The findings also imply language-specific mechanisms of sentence comprehension, contingent upon the varied impact of a verb on sentence meaning in English and Korean.

ENSINO DE PROGRAMAÇÃO PARA CRIANÇAS E O DESENVOLVIMENTO DO PENSAMENTO COMPUTACIONAL: ALGUMAS REFLEXÕES

One of the great challenges faced by education is to reflect on the effective uses of digital information and communication technologies, in order to provide students with contextualized and meaningful learning. Therefore, the objective of the article is to reflect on the effective uses of digital information and communication technologies in education in these technological times, to achieve other ways of providing education. The teaching of programming can generate stimuli for the development of computational thinking, allowing the child to become a builder of digital artifacts. We emphasize, therefore, that our study is theoretical and reflective, consisting of bibliographical research, with contributions from Castells (1999), Coll and Monereo (2010), Papert (1994), Selwyn (2017), among other scholars. We present, at first, an explanation about the constructionist approach and education, based on the studies of its creator Seymour Papert. In a second moment, we reflect on teaching programming to children to then contextualize the computational thinking and implementation strategies adopted. From this study, we glimpse a horizon of possibilities for the necessary paradigm shift in education.

Why They Know Not What They Do: A Social Constructionist Approach to the Explanatory Problem of False Consciousness

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap, or are entirely absent.

Co-constructions, co-performances and co-reflections in early years qualitative research

This study investigates our role as early years researchers in qualitative data analysis. We draw on our doctoral studies to address how the co-construction, co-performance and co-reflection of narratives elicit deeper and new understandings of early years workers in England, and how our life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry. Employing a constructionist approach and building on Buitelaar theorisation of I-positions and the multi-vocal ‘self’, we explore how narratives are co-constructed and co-performed between the researched and researcher in relation to the ‘self’ and master narratives of culture, time and place. Data were collected using focus groups and semi-structured interviews involving 50 early years workers and 17 nurseries situated in the South East of England. By ‘co-reflecting’ on how the data was analysed, we discussed the ways in which we and our participants are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social class, mother and worker. Our reflections offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of how early years workers and their practice are constructed in England.