Keynote, talks, program

Keynote speech title: Who kissed who? Constructing a language for learners, teachers and researchersWhen confronted with a sentence like The boy was kissed by the girl, learners often answer the question Who kissed who? incorrectly. Why? Because they know the transitive Subject-Verb-Object construction and they assume that English word order is a better cue than the morphology. This kind of error is symptomatic of the way that language is designed, as a network of interrelated grammatical constructions of varying specificity and complexity. In this talk I will explore construction grammar as a model of language and show how this promotes useful research that can inform teaching, especially through corpus investigation of the properties of constructions and the building of 'constructicons' that represent the structures that learners need to acquire.