About the Project
The project aims to contribute to the understanding of what constitutes multilingual competence in an international higher education setting – a prime example a multicultural and multilingual community of language users. Usage-based approaches provide a suitable framework for such investigations because they see language as a socio-cognitive phenomenon and linguistic competence in a language user is seen as emergent from the history of his/her language use. In terms of structure, usage-based approaches describe language as an inventory of form-meaning mappings conventionalized in a language community and entrenched in the minds of its language users.
Based on these views, the project addresses the following general questions:
- What form-meaning mappings become conventionalized in such multilingual communities?
- How is the process of conventionalization influenced by the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the language users?
Methodologically, the project draws on usage-based analyses informed by Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, and on Corpus Linguistic analyses of frequency distributions.
Duration
3 years