El lexema verbal transitivo : criterios de selección de un corpus nuclear para la enseñanza/aprendizaje de una L2

From the functional and cognitive approaches to language, the lexical component represents the main element in the linguistic analysis. The present article supposses the application of this principle to the teaching of English as L2 through the establishment of a series of criteria for the selection of a nuclear functional lexical syllabus. These criteria coincide with a corpus of prototypical transitive verbs, as it is revealed by linguistic and cognitive reasons: first, in such verbs there are a confluence of prototipicallity referred to the three levels of language as communication (lexical-grammatical and discoursive); second, the idealized cognitive models (ICMs) these verbs are represented by are not only universal buy, furthermore, they structure and determine the mental lexicon operation. These properties presented in a cognitive-semantic-map frame could shorten the cognitive distance between Spanish and English by transfering the cognitivelinguistic resources which learners already possess in their first language.