Edited by Inga Hennecke and Evelyn Wiesinger
[Constructional Approaches to Language 34] 2023
► pp. 375–404
This paper focuses on predicative constructions with ser and have-constructions with tener in written language production of native German students studying Spanish as a third language (L3). First, I establish a common ground between a usage-based approach and construction grammar and then define so-called ‘construction learning’ in the teaching of a foreign language. Subsequently, the study investigates the use of tener (‘to have’) and ser (‘to be’), both irregular high-frequency verbs, in the third person singular and the constructional embedding of these two verbal forms in patterns like [N es ADJ] (Mi amigo es alto ‘my friend is tall’) and [ART N tiene ART N ADJ] (La chica tiene los ojos azules ‘the girl has blue eyes’) by 12- and 13-year-old and 15- and 16-year-old native German students. As a text type, the ‘description of the person’ was chosen – a text type which is already practiced in the first year of language learning and is therefore suitable for comparative corpus-based studies of different learner levels.