CHAPTER 7. Speaking skills 111 (1) Il était une fois une maman cochonne qui avait trois petits cochons. Once upon a time there was a mama pig who had three little pigs. Froma SBperspective, the sentence in example 1 couldbe deconstructed andbrokendown into major constituents and analyzed further from the syntactic to the morphological level, focusing on gender, agreement, and tense. Implicit to such an approach is the consideration that a speaker builds up such a sentence by applying grammatical rules while producing it and that, over time and as second language pro ciency increases, this process becomes (more) automatic. Even though SB views do not deny the existence of meaning and language use, the focus is rst and foremost on grammatical form, with meaning and use added as separate components and at a later stage. Example 2 below illustrates this deconstructing process. (2) Il (Subject-pronoun) était (predicator-third person singular-past tense) une fois (adverbial-noun phrase) une maman cochonne [qui / avait / trois petits cochons] (Subject Attribute-noun phrase modi ed by a relative clause) A usage-based view does not deny that sentences consist of major constituents that can themselves be broken down and analyzed, nor that there are regularities in language, but usage-based approaches emphasize that such categories are superimposed at the analytical level by linguists and, for learners, they do not necessarily have any psychological reality. e premise underlying usage-based approaches to language learning, instead, is that a speaker uses sequences of sounds (forms) that have been used and that have been encountered in similar contexts (use) with a similar meaning (meaning) (Schmid, 2020) and are learned by association. e form-function combinations that have been used most frequently, and are thus most salient for learners, are the ones that are typically learned rst, that become entrenched in the mind, and are eventually produced automatically. Some of these sequences are rather xed (as in chunks or other multi-word sequences) but others have open slots, and the construction can form a template for new-to-be-acquired sequences and constructions (as in verbargument constructions). Example 3 illustrates form-use-meaning combinations. (3) Il était une fois (a xed phrase that is used to introduce a fairy tale) une maman cochonne (a being) qui avait (expressing some possession) trois petits cochons. (some beings)
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