Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure: (45 Typological Studies in Language)

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people’s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction to frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (by Bybee, Joan L.); 2. Part I: Patterns of Use; 3. Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation (by Thompson, Sandra A.); 4. Local patterns of subjectivity in person and verb type in American English coversation (by Scheibman, Joanne); 5. Paths to prepositions? A corpus-based study of the acquisition of a lexico-grammatical category (by Hallan, Naomi); 6. Part II: Word-level frequency effects; 7. Lexical diffusion, lexical frequency, and lexical analysis (by Phillips, Betty S.); 8. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast (by Pierrehumbert, Janet B.); 9. Emergent phonotactic generalizations in English and Arabic (by Frisch, Stefan A.); 10. Ambiguity and frequency effects in regular verb inflection (by Hare, Mary L.); 11. Frequency, regularity and the paradigm: A perspective from Russian on a complex relation (by Corbett, Greville G.); 12. Part III: Phrases and constructions; 13. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production (by Jurafsky, Daniel); 14. Frequency effects and word-boundary palatization in English (by Bush, Nathan); 15. The role of frequency in the realization of English that (by Berkenfield, Catie); 16. Frequency, iconicity, categorization: Evidence from emerging modals (by Krug, Manfred G.); 17. Frequency effects on French liaison (by Bybee, Joan L.); 18. The role of frequency in the specialization of the English anterior (by Smith, K. Aaron); 19. Hypercorrect pronoun case in English? Cognitive processes that account for pronoun usage (by Boyland, Joyce Tang); 20. Variability, frequency, and productivity in the irrealis domain of French (by Poplack, Shana); 21. Part IV: General; 22. Familiarity, information flow, and linguistic form (by Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud); 23. Emergentist approaches to language (by MacWhinney, Brian); 24. Inflationary effects in language and elsewhere (by Dahl, Osten); 25. Subject index; 26. Name index

Review :
The collection contains very insightful articles on the issues of the highest interest to phoneticians, morphologists, syntacticians, cognitive linguists and psycholinguists. They represent the very healthy attitude of the recent years to focus on the question of possible relationships between abstract linguistic structures and issues in performance captured in empirical terms. The most sriking feature of the book is perhaps the wealth of data presented in the articles. In contrast to much other work in contemporary linguistics, in which the researcher's linguistic intuitions often provide the only data source, the authors of the papers in this volume back up their theoretical claims with statistically analyzed data from large corpora, psycholinguistic experiments and linguistic surveys. The volume presents an important contribution to the growing body of literature in which grammar is seen as a dynamic system that emerges from language use. I was especially impressed by the amount of data presented in the papers and the attention that has been given to methodological issues. Linguistics is often criticized for being non-empirical, but this critique certainly does not hold for the book under review.