Intuitive and Informal Knowledge in Preschoolers’ Development of Probabilistic Thinking

Preschoolers develop a wide range of mathematical informal knowledge and intuitive thinking before they enter formal, goal-oriented education. In their everyday activities young children get engaged with situations that enhance them to develop skills, concepts, strategies, representations, attitudes, constructs and operations concerning a wide range of mathematical notions. Recently there is scientific interest in linking children’s informal and formal knowledge in order to provide them with opportunities to avoid biases aiming at formulating, perceiving, reflecting on and exercising probabilistic notions. The current study investigates preschoolers’ (N=90) intuitive understanding of the likelihood of events in a probabilistic task with spinners. Participants, at the age of 4 to 6, are tested on their predictions of the most probable outcome prior to and after an instructive session of reasoning. The probabilistic task, based on constructivist principles, includes methodological alterations concerning the sample space and the themes of the stimuli. Educational implications are further discussed under the general point of view that in order to link informal to formal mathematical learning in preschool classroom, the subject content and the cognitive capacity of children are important to match

Play, Learn, and Teach Outdoors—Network (PLaTO-Net): terminology, taxonomy, and ontology

Background: A recent dialogue in the field of play, learn, and teach outdoors (referred to as “PLaTO” hereafter) demonstrated the need for developing harmonized and consensus-based terminology, taxonomy, and ontology for PLaTO. This is important as the field evolves and diversifies in its approaches, contents, and contexts over time and in different countries, cultures, and settings. Within this paper, we report the systematic and iterative processes undertaken to achieve this objective, which has built on the creation of the global PLaTO-Network (PLaTO-Net). Methods: This project comprised of four major methodological phases. First, a systematic scoping review was conducted to identify common terms and definitions used pertaining to PLaTO. Second, based on the results of the scoping review, a draft set of key terms, taxonomy, and ontology were developed, and shared with PLaTO members, who provided feedback via four rounds of consultation. Third, PLaTO terminology, taxonomy, and ontology were then finalized based on the feedback received from 50 international PLaTO member participants who responded to ≥ 3 rounds of the consultation survey and dialogue. Finally, efforts to share and disseminate project outcomes were made through different online platforms. Results: This paper presents the final definitions and taxonomy of 31 PLaTO terms along with the PLaTO-Net ontology model. The model incorporates other relevant concepts in recognition that all the aspects of the model are interrelated and interconnected. The final terminology, taxonomy, and ontology are intended to be applicable to, and relevant for, all people encompassing various identities (e.g., age, gender, culture, ethnicity, ability). Conclusions: This project contributes to advancing PLaTO-based research and facilitating intersectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration, with the long-term goal of fostering and strengthening PLaTO’s synergistic linkages with healthy living, environmental stewardship, climate action, and planetary health agendas. Notably, PLaTO terminology, taxonomy and ontology will continue to evolve, and PLaTO-Net is committed to advancing and periodically updating harmonized knowledge and understanding in the vast and interrelated areas of PLaTO

Modern greek as: A case study in grammaticalization and grammatical polysemy

The grammaticalization of as from a lexical imperative of Ancient Greek to a particle of Modern Greek follows some well-identified trends in historical linguistics. An adequate description of the change needs to refer simultaneously to semantic, syntactic and phonological parameters, which makes as a typical case of grammaticalization and a clear example of interaction of all such parameters. As, a highly polysemous category in Modern Greek, follows complex paths of development which for their description require also reference to 1) semantic relations such as metaphor and metonymy and 2) the interaction of existing grammatical patterns of the language with the emergent category. © 1996 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Grammatical variability and the grammar of genre: Constructions, conventionality, and motivation in ‘stage directions’

Low-frequency grammatical constructions as well as marked, unexpected interpretations of more productive ones are often associated with specific contexts, including socio-culturally defined genres. In the present work, I investigate the post-posed subject construction in stage directions, which features unique morpho-syntax in the grammar of English, and the context-specific, conventional interpretation of the present tense in the same genre. While both of these patterns exhibit idiosyncratic features that warrant constructional status, they are shown to relate systematically to other constructions in the language. Such formal and functional motivation can be captured in terms of constructional inheritance and genre-sensitive coercion, i.e. coercion that takes into account the functional requirements of specific genres. Constructional frameworks thus emerge as fully capable to account for the “periphery” of linguistic structures in a way that accommodates both their idiosyncratic and their regular (inherited) components, and provide a principled way of modeling speakers' knowledge of variable grammar. © 2020 Elsevier B.V

Grammatical constructions and cross-text generalizations Empathetic narration as genre

This paper investigates two tense-based constructions in English and Greek and one complementation construction in Greek, whose import is to effect a deictic shift and allow narration to proceed from the point of view of the narrated events and a participant therein. In addition to the individual formal and discourse- pragmatic properties of the patterns at hand, I focus on properties of the embedding context, showing that these unrelated constructions impose similar formal and interpretational requirements. This, in turn, supports the statement of generalizations at the level of genre, in this case empathetic narration as a special kind of narration that departs from the default past narrative which is deictically anchored to the narrator and the conversational coordinates. While the analysis adopts a bottom-up, language-driven approach to genre, it also refutes its exhaustive equation with linguistic conventions, arguing that a Bakhtinian view of genre, which includes both linguistic and socio-cultural dimensions, is more appropriate for the data at hand

Conceptual blending and the interpretation of relatives: A case study from Greek

This article examines instances of the pu relative construction in Modern Greek in which the semantic role of the head is underspecified by the syntax. Such cases include sentences whose nominal head corresponds to some complement of the relative clause predicate and sentences in which the head does not have any sort of syntactic relationship with the relative. The latter, which are characteristic of oral, informal discourse, have been completely ignored in the previous literature, which has defined relatives on the basis of exclusively structural criteria. It is argued that a unified account of the pu-construction (including gapped and gapless relatives) can be achieved if we analyze it as a conventional instruction for a particular kind of conceptual integration. Semantic and pragmatic factors influencing successful construal (one which leads to the construction of a unique blend) are systematically examined. The lack of a clear cut-off point in acceptability for such utterances tallies with the conclusion reached here, namely that the constraints governing such uses are constraints on interpretability. © Walter de Gruyter

Viewpoint and construction grammar: The case of past + now

The combination of a past tense verb with a proximal deictic has been identified in the literature as one of the formal markings of free indirect style (Adamson, 1995). In this article, I examine corpus-derived, non-literary occurrences of the pattern, arguing that construction grammar can provide an adequate, all-encompassing framework for both literary and non-literary uses. Defined as conventional pairings of meaning and form, constructions can accommodate all kinds of semantic, pragmatic, discoursal and textual information as part of their meaning. In the case of the past + now pattern such specifications include a particular discourse or text type, namely narrative, which is the licensing context, and whose conventional association with the particular form constitutes precisely a distinct (discourse) construction. Within this constructional context, the past tense makes a predictable, compositional contribution while the present deictic suppresses part of its meaning signalling instead an anchoring to the current experience, thought, perception of the other. Where present, the progressive aspect enhances further this shift in perspective in a way fully consistent with its basic (non-truth conditional, cognitively defined) semantics. I attempt to show that a constructional approach to past + now may therefore pinpoint the source of the viewpoint effect associated with the pattern in all its uses, and illuminate the relationship of free indirect style with constructions of non-literary discourse. © The Author(s) 2010

Dialogic constructions and discourse units: The case of think again

Adopting a constructionally-oriented analysis, the present paper examines the pattern 'think again' (i.e., an instance of a mental state verb + adverbial adjunct) in synchronic, corpus-derived data. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative analyses we show that think again merits constructional status in language; while it inherits features of fully-compositional meaning from its constituents it has also developed its own idiosyncratic properties. We further argue that think again may ultimately function as a discourse marker of challenge that regulates the relationship between Speaker (S) and Addressee (A), correlating with certain contextual regularities and interdependencies. It thus qualifies as a discourse construction that imposes a dialogic construal on its context and contributes fundamentally to discourse unit delimitation. © 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved

Construction grammar and conventional discourse: A construction-based approach to discoursal incongruity

In line with recent work extending the constructional approach to dialogic constructions (e.g. Fried, 2009; Linell, 2009), we argue that constructional analysis can be profitably extended to larger-than-the-sentence chunks representing conventionalized discourses, such as classroom discourse, telephone-call openings, scholarly editions, horoscopes, etc. The structural regularities associated with these genres - realized, in our examples, either as fixed sequencing or as formal templates - can be recast as the (semi)-schematic features of large scale constructions. To the extent that lexical choices are constrained (and can be rendered, for example, in the form of drop lists), they are accommodated as their (semi)-substantive component. Clause-level patterns, typical of the discourses we analyze, are also recognized as constructions on the basis of their conventional association with each genre. Using established in the constructional literature attribute-value pairs, we demonstrate that the constructional approach allows for a construction-by-construction and word-by word identification of the conventional make-up of these supra-clausal patterns; when such patterns are humorously exploited, a constructional analysis foregrounds the verbal basis of the incongruity in a principled way. This proposal allows us to embed entrenched patterns of all sizes uniformly in a theory of grammar, accounts for different types of (encoding) idiomaticity and provides common cognitive grounding for all kinds of conventional knowledge (cf. Östman, 2005). © 2011 Elsevier B.V