That students of English as a Foreign Language transfer skills from their first language to the production of English has been well known for decades. Yet until now, no detailed analysis of the transfer mechanism has been proposed. This book applies the insights of conceptual blending theory to the study of learner constructions and transfer, showing them to be the result of crosslinguistic blending. Such blends disassemble acceptable L1- specific constructions and reblend them with FL lexemes, creating unusual, non-standard utterances that may or may not be comprehensible to English native speakers. Drawing on psycholinguistic models of speech production, the lexicon, and the conceptual base; the sociolinguistic paradigms of ethnopragmatics, inner speech, and the speech community; and the cognitive linguistic fields of construction grammar and blending, this erudite, interdisciplinary study is the first to provide such a detailed examination of the Lithuanian-English language system. It should be of interest to professional linguists and EFL teachers, and anyone interested in the Lithuanian language.

Algis Braun, Ph.D., has taught EFL at various universities in Kaunas, Lithuania, since 1994. In addition to writing for the popular Super English series of EFL textbooks for Lithuanian schools, he has been both a translator and film narrator. In 2008 he was named Professor of the Year at Vilnius University, Kaunas Faculty of Humanities.