Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Pedagogical Grammar: The Case of Over

Language learning is one of the most complicated feats that human beings accomplish. Any number of very real reasons exist as to why L2 learning presents tremendous challenges. However, instructed L2 learning has been further complicated by the fact that important elements of systematicity that exist in language have not been appropriately captured by the pedagogical grammars which underlie modern foreign language teaching textbooks and materials. For instance, lexical classes, such as English prepositions, are represented in the grammars (and the textbooks based on them) in piecemeal fashion. When students (and their teachers) encounter varying uses of these forms, the systematic relations between the multiple uses remain unexplained. For example, traditional analyses have not offered any explanations for why the four different meanings found in the sentences in (1a-d) are all associated with the form over: