Usage-Based Linguistics

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking.

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between the forms of clause combination and their systematic patterns of explicit inter-clausal coherence. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of the Adaptive Approach to Grammar. The Adaptive Approach conceives of combined clauses as a hierarchy of conventionalized units for discourse coherence management. The grammatical properties of the different combined clauses determine their position on the hierarchy, and these properties are claimed to correlate with whether the construction is more, or less, of a cohesive unit for packaging multiple propositions. The study pursues the hypothesis that clauses higher on the hierarchy, being the more cohesive grammatical constructions, should tend to manage coherence between the propositions they combine (i.e. the clausal constituents) through fewer explicit discourse-pragmatic ties than the clauses considered less cohesive grammatical constructions. An analysis of cohesive ties in 450 combined clauses, representing 9 different English clause types, indicates an inverse relationship exists between the level of grammatical integration and the frequency of inter-clausal cohesive ties. It is argued to be a quantifiable consequence of grammatical hierarchy, reflecting a continuum of coherence management from discourse to grammar.

In this chapter, we extend a usage-based theory of Construction Morphology to the analysis of sign language structure, to address two long-standing categorization problems in sign language linguistics. Sign language linguistics traditionally distinguishes monomorphemic core lexical signs from multimorphemic classifier construction signs, based on whether or not a sign form exhibits analyzable morphological structure ("the Core vs. Classifier problem"). In this tradition, core signs are retrieved from the lexicon, while classifier signs are derived productively via grammatical rules. Sign linguists are also accustomed to classifying discrete and listable aspects of sign structure as language, while aspects of signing that exhibit more holism or gradience are considered to be gesture ("the Language vs. Gesture problem"). These categories of core vs. classifier on the one hand and language vs. gesture on the other derive from a shared source: the assumption that linguistic forms are built up from discrete building blocks. Instead, we analyze multimodal usage events in terms of constructions, conventional patterns of meaning and form containing both fixed elements and variable slots and organized in a structured network. We argue that the Construction Morphology approach leads to a uniform analysis of core and classifier signs alike, without resorting to an a priori distinction between language and gesture.

This paper presents a usage-based, Cognitive Grammar analysis of Place as a symbolic structure in signed languages. We suggest that many signs are better viewed as constructions in which schematic or specific formal properties are extracted from usage events alongside specific or schematic meaning. We argue that pointing signs are complex constructions composed of a pointing device and a Place, each of which are symbolic structures having form and meaning. We extend our analysis to antecedent-anaphora constructions and directional verb constructions. Finally, we discuss how the usage-based approach suggests a new way of understanding the relationship between language and gesture.

In this paper, I will investigate one general theory of language change that can be subsumed under the functional and usage-based paradigms: William Croft’s Theory of Utterance
Selection as proposed in his 2000 book “Explaining Language Change. An Evolutionary Approach”, which draws on the Darwinian idea of evolution and proposes a general framework that is supposed to explain the workings of language change. As an empirical example I will use the ongoing spread of TH-fronting in British English (BrE) in order to test whether his Theory of Utterance Selection (henceforth his theory or the theory) can be brought in line with
popular arguments put forward to explain this case of language change. Indeed, I argue that Croft’s theory can be used to explain motivations for TH-fronting in Great Britain.

This paper describes the wdydwyd construction—the tautological construction exemplified by "I did what I did," "she does what she does" and the like—and explains why it is used in the way it is used. Is it because English speakers start with the abstract tautological structure and perform pragmatic computations on every occasion of use? Or alternatively because they learn and memorize specific facts about how the construction is conventionally used? It is shown that the construction exhibits its own skewed frequencies (e.g. its strong preference for reason/cause contexts). Though the frequent usage patterns are closely related to each other (i.e. motivated), one cannot predict the whole gamut of those patterns from the tautological structure the construction represents. Furthermore, the construction seems to be cross-linguistically rare: It has no counterparts in the eight other languages I surveyed including German, Chinese, and Russian. Therefore, the online computation explanation cannot be maintained. The conclusion has to be that English speakers mentally store specific facts about the conventional uses of the construction.

Note: This paper, which appeared in the English Linguistics journal (2017, Volume 33, Issue 2, Pages 499-510), is uploaded here with permission from the the English Linguistic Society of Japan.

Corpus analysis can be expanded and scaled up by incorporating computational methods from natural language processing. This Element shows how text classification and text similarity models can extend our ability to undertake corpus linguistics across very large corpora. These computational methods are becoming increasingly important as corpora grow too large for more traditional types of linguistic analysis. We draw on five case studies to show how and why to use computational methods, ranging from usage-based grammar to authorship analysis to using social media for corpus-based sociolinguistics. Each section is accompanied by an interactive code notebook that shows how to implement the analysis in Python. A standalone Python package is also available to help readers use these methods with their own data. Because large-scale analysis introduces new ethical problems, this Element pairs each new methodology with a discussion of potential ethical implications.

This interdisciplinary study revises the standard view of the most common human-denoting noun in each of three languages: Ancient Hebrew (אִישׁ ’îš and its feminine form), English (man/woman), and French (homme/femme). The author hypothesized that such a noun prototypically labels its referent succinctly as “a participant in a situation,” which makes it highly efficient in communication. The study confirms that the Hebrew noun in question was indeed the preferred term for defining a situation or indicating participation that truly matters to the discourse. In addition, the hypothesis explains several otherwise-puzzling usage patterns in the Hebrew Bible, such as appositions, while resolving longstanding interpretive cruxes that feature this noun. The study closes with discussion of the role of gender, the life cycle of this special class of nouns, and implications for Modern Hebrew and other languages.

The following paper describes an action research project where the author combined his interest in philosophy and efforts to promote improved oral language proficiency and academic discourse in his class of learners at an upper level secondary school English class.
The author conducted action research where he evaluated the effectiveness of the teaching methods and approaches as well as the improvements of the learners, and the learners attitudes regarding their own improvements in the target language, the methods the teacher employed, the approaches employed, and the material used in the course.
This paper reviews the teaching plan in which learners read and discussed philosophical texts. By using pre-reading activities, reading journals, and discussions the aim was for the learners to improve their ability to use the English language in writing, reading, understanding spoken and written language, and to be able to communicate better in the language.
The results of the research indicate that the methods and approaches were, in many ways, beneficial though the learners themselves noticed the greatest improvements in general comprehension, reading, listening, and writing – but are not noticing themselves the same levels of improvements in their productive oral proficiency. The learners did express more confidence in using English outside of classroom.

Throughout the 20s century, structuralist and generative linguists have argued that the study of the language system (langue, competence) must be separated from the study of language use (parole, performance); but this view of language has been called into question by usage-based linguists who have argued that the structure and organization of a speaker's linguistic knowledge is the product of language use or performance. On this account, language is seen as a dynamic system of fluid categories and flexible constraints that are constantly restructured and reorganized under the pressure of domain-general cognitive processes that are not only involved in the use of language but also in other cognitive phenomena such as vision and (joint) attention. The general goal of usage-based linguistics is to develop a framework for the analysis of the emergence of linguistic structure and meaning. In order to understand the dynamics of the language system, usage-based linguists study how languages evolve, both in history and language acquisition. One aspect that plays an important role in this approach is frequency of occurrence. As frequency strengthens the representation of linguistic elements in memory, it facilitates the activation and processing of words, categories, and constructions, which in turn can have long-lasting effects on the development and organization of the linguistic system. A second aspect that has been very prominent in the usage-based study of grammar concerns the relationship between lexical and structural knowledge. Since abstract representations of linguistic structure are derived from language users' experience with concrete linguistic tokens, grammatical patterns are generally associated with particular lexical expressions.

The aim of this thesis is to give a phonological account of acoustic variation and reduction. It is argued that phonological representations are uneven and include information about the relative strength of the segmental and subsegmental units composing them. This unevenness implies a distinction between the invariant – the “phonetic essence” of a word, which is practically undeletable – and other units which can be dispensed with under certain circumstances. In the first chapter I compare different theoretical approaches to the problem of acoustic variation, in particular with reference to generative phonology and exemplar-based theories. In the second chapter I propose a model which combines aspects of Optimality Theory, Element Theory and usage-based linguistics. Additionally, I discuss the role of acoustic salience in the formation of the invariant. In chapter three, typological and experimental data are examined in order to establish a salience scale for consonants. In chapter four, the results of the acoustic analysis of four dialogues extracted from a corpus of spoken Italian are presented. As expected, highly salient consonants are preserved to a greater extent than less salient ones. In chapter five I attempt to identify the phonological correlates of acoustic salience and discuss other factors which may favor reduction and deletion, among which predictability. In chapter six I draw some conclusions, deal with some pending issues and suggest future directions for research.

Lo scopo di questa tesi è di rendere conto della variazione e della riduzione acustica da un punto di vista fonologico. Secondo il modello che propongo, le rappresentazioni fonologiche sono disomogenee e racchiudono informazioni sulla forza relativa delle unità segmentali e subsegmentali che le compongono. Questa disomogeneità implica una distinzione tra l’invariante, o “essenza fonetica” di una parola, che è praticamente incancellabile, e altre unità di cui, in certe circostanze, si può fare a meno. Nel primo capitolo vengono confrontati diversi approcci teorici al problema della variazione acustica, facendo riferimento in particolare alla fonologia generativa e alla Teoria degli Esemplari. Nel secondo capitolo, oltre a proporre un modello che combina aspetti della Teoria dell’Ottimalità, della Teoria degli Elementi e della linguistica usage-based, si discute anche il ruolo della salienza acustica nella formazione dell’invariante. Nel terzo capitolo vengono esaminati dati tipologici e sperimentali per costruire una scala di salienza delle consonanti. Il quarto capitolo presenta i risultati dell’analisi acustica di quattro dialoghi estratti da un corpus di italiano parlato. Come previsto, le consonanti più salienti vengono conservate più frequentemente di quelle meno salienti. Nel quinto capitolo si tenta di individuare i correlati fonologici della salienza acustica e vengono discussi altri fattori che possono favorire la riduzione e la cancellazione, tra cui la predicibilità. Nel sesto capitolo si traggono alcune conclusioni, vengono trattate alcune questioni irrisolte e si suggeriscono delle future linee di ricerca.

Vietnamese (Vietic, Mon-Khmer, Austroasiatic) is monosyllabic and tonal.  Most Mon-Khmer (MK) languages are multisyllabic and atonal.  Evidence suggests that Vietnamese (VN) has had its tones less than one millennium, and that other languages (both MK and non-MK) are also acquiring tones, a process called tonogenesis.
    Comparing VN’s phonology to that of closely related languages, Haudricourt has identified several stages of tonogenesis.  We know that Vietnamese tonogenesis included monosyllabization, loss of onset voicing distinctions, and loss of laryngeal codas, but how and why, and in what order?  And why do other languages follow similar paths?
    Usage-based phonology claims that language change is driven by articulatory reduction, which motivates similar paths of change across related and unrelated languages.  If speakers use a word often, they conserve effort by saying it the ‘easy’ way.  And even if a word is reduced, its frequency helps listeners to perceive it.  Frequent words reduce first, then infrequent words.
    I argue that tonogenesis can be given such an articulatory account, and I detail what such an account should include.  Comparing VN’s sound changes to those in other MK languages, and to reductive processes noted by vocal physiology and articulatory phonetics, I demonstrate that each change along the tonogenetic path is an articulatory reduction.  There is much about past tonogenetic processes that we cannot test, but the most recent of those processes are still synchronically evident in comparisons of frequent to infrequent words.
    To show that a usage-based account of tonogenesis is supported by synchronic facts, I analyze the spontaneous conversations and directed readings of 16 VN speakers in Hanoi and near Saigon.  Acoustic measurements reveal that (relative to infrequent words) VN’s frequent words are reduced in three ways: they exhibit less negative spectral tilt, less duration, and less pitch excursion.  The significance of each is explained.
    Empirical results support the usage-based, articulatory account that I propose.  Future studies of sound change will gain useful diachronic insights by including considerations of usage frequency and articulatory reduction.

El presente trabajo presenta el perfil discursivo de los verbos de percepción visual ver y mirar a partir de un corpus de español oral peninsular. Con el objeto de elaborar dicho perfil, se realizó un análisis de tipo cuantitativo basado en el Corpus de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (COREC). Se extrajeron un total de 503 ejemplos de los cuales 148 corresponden al verbos mirar y 355 al verbo ver.
Investigaciones anteriores basadas en el uso han servido para elaborar patrones sintácticos de diversos verbos y obtener así una visión más realista de la estructura argumental de los distintos predicados. Además, este tipo de análisis proporciona información acerca de otros patrones de uso por parte de los hablantes, al tener en cuenta otros factores más allá del tipo de elementos que acompañan al verbo.
Los resultados del estudio muestran una estructura argumental más sencilla de la que nos puede ofrecer un análisis basado en la intuición, puesto que en muchas ocasiones tanto ver como mirar aparecen sin un complemento. La investigación proporciona otros datos importantes sobre patrones de uso relacionados con factores como la persona del sujeto, modo y tiempo verbal así como el tipo de complementación y de objeto directo. Otro elemento significativo que el estudio ha revelado, es la importancia que tienen en la estructura argumental las construcciones gramaticalizadas a partir de ambos verbos. Estas construcciones se presentan en forma de distintos marcadores discursivos tanto para ver como para mirar, como se puede observar en los siguientes ejemplos extraídos del corpus.
(1) COREC
A ver si me pongo a trabajar y me espabilo un poco
(2) COREC
Mira, hija. Si te vas a poner así por el maldito examen

The two English serial verb constructions, go-VERB and come-VERB, are subject to a peculiar morphological restriction, called the Bare Stem Condition. The constraint states that neither the verb in V1 nor its directly adjacent dependent verb in V2 can (or does) occur with (overt) inflection (<i>Go see a doctor!</i>, They invited him to come visit them, but *She goes sees a doctor, *They were going playing golf). The constraint is near-unique to English; it is non-predictable from other rules or patterns of English grammar and without any obvious systemic motivation. Due to its apparent arbitrariness, the constraint has mainly been approached from formal and parametric perspectives.
By contrast, the current approach takes a usage-based view and argues that the constraint is functionally conditioned by the constructions' semantics and the make-up of the English morphological paradigm. On the one hand, the constructions show a notable preference for directive-commissive functions (orders, commands, invitations, recommendations, suggestions, etc.), arguing that go/come-VERB have a hortative schema core. On the other hand, such non-assertive propositions in English are encoded using bare verb forms (imperatives, infinitival complements). The skew towards bare form, albeit motivated, is thus seen as an (historical) accident, which is contemporarily highly conventionalized and entrenched.
Methodologically, the approach suggests a syntactic co-location approach (“You shall know a construction by the company it keeps”), inferring constructional semantics by distributional preferences of co-occurrence with leftward syntactic units (e.g., imperatives, (semi)modals, let's-constructions, speech act verbs). The usage of go/come-VERB is investigated in four case studies of constraint violation, network relations (viz. go/come-and-VERB), diachronic development, and schema acquisition. The evidence suggests that an explanatory attempt of a seemingly arbitrary formal constraint is possible without recourse to innate linguistic knowledge.

Rather than turning backward and remembering 9/11, this book sets out to reflect on how the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted our perspectives on a whole series of political, economic, social, and cultural processes. Beyond 9/11 raises the question how the intense debates on the 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermaths have come to shape our present moment and frame what lies ahead. At the same time, this collection acknowledges that the label «9/11» has often bracketed cultural complexities we have only begun to understand. In Beyond 9/11, contributors from the fields of American studies, political science, economics, history, theology, and the arts reappraise the cultural climate and the global impact of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

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This paper compares the usage patterns or usage dynamics of discourse markers and their combinations in Alsea and Siuslaw, two dormant languages of the Oregon Coast with a long history of contact and convergence. Like many languages of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Alsea and Siuslaw have a set of clause-initial markers mostly used for adverbial and pragmatic functions. These markers often co-occur, and in both languages clauses in connected discourse have zero to four such markers. Despite the similar potential range for combinations, the patterns by which these markers are used in the two languages differ: discourse markers co-occur much more frequently in Alsea, in more varied combinations, and their relative order tends to be more set. We propose that this is correlated with the coding means used to structure discourse in the two languages, particularly the different functions of individual markers and of their common combinations. We illustrate this by comparing the uses of two discourse markers, Alsea tem and Siuslaw ᵘɬ, roughly translatable to English by "and", and the uses of their combination with Alsea múⁿhū and Siuslaw wàn, roughly translatable to English by "now, then".

Despite being a well-known and widely attested phenomenon, ancient Greek crasis has usually been consigned to the field of metrics and prosodic phenomena in verse. A number of authors have already drawn attention to the nature of the elements involved in the phenomenon, pointing out that crasis applies to two elements that “belong together” (Smyth 1956: 22) , are “étroitement associés” (Lejeune 1987: 321), form an appositive group (Devine & Stephens 1994: 268) or “are syntactically connected” (Fritz 2013). Furthermore, some authors relate it to “ordinary speech” (West 1982: 12–13), which is usually avoided both in poetry and in prose. It can be found, however, in Attic drama and in some prose texts (e.g. Plato), although its distribution is not homogeneous. While being a regular way of hiatus resolution in iambic trimeters in some specific contexts (Devine & Stephens 1994: 266–8), crasis in prose is restricted to some specific phrases. The phenomenon itself has not been, in my opinion, sufficiently explained, specifically as to why and how the contraction of the vowels and the merger of the two words occur.
This paper aims at reanalysing both the phenomenon and its uneven distribution in classical Greek through a corpus consisting of the works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon and Demosthenes.

Redes hierárquicas baseadas em classes semânticas são centrais à Gramática de Construções Baseada no Uso. Como consequência, um desafio metodológico emerge: como identificar as classes semânticas que definem construções intermediárias de uma rede construcional? A fim de contribuir para responder a essa questão, este estudo desenvolve e aplica uma proposta metodológica à Construção de Complementação
Sentencial do português brasileiro. O método proposto prevê o mapeamento de construções com verbo especificado à luz da Teoria dos Exemplares, a postulação de categorias semânticas abstratas por meio da observação dos atributos semânticos latentes em clusters de exemplares e o emprego de Escalonamento Multidimensional para verificar a realidade psicológica da rede postulada.

This chapter provides an overview of cognitive sociolinguistics, framed in such a way that opportunities for new research should become apparent. In order to achieve this, I relate cognitive sociolinguistics to the domains of inquiry from which both cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics have themselves emerged, i.e. cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology and of course linguistics itself. Emphasis is paid to the influence and value of these fields in terms of both methodology and theory. From a sociology of science perspective, I suggest that although some of the most prominent sociolinguists remain reluctant to engage with cognitive linguistics, there are now also some clear signs of change in this respect. This is positive for the development of cognitive sociolinguistics, but cognitive linguists can in fact also do more to advance the field by engaging not just with sociolinguistic theory but also with the sociolinguistic community.

Code-mixing, regarded as a characteristic feature of  fluent bilingual speech, has been investigated from various perspectives. This article argues for a usage-based approach to code-mixing as a unified theoretical framework, which is capable of integrating the multitude of existing explanations for this phenomenon and of yielding new insights into its structure. Under a usage-based view, linguistic knowledge emerges in language use, which is grounded in social interaction and is affected by cognitive processing. The aspects of human cognition explored in the present article as factors influencing the structure of code-mixing include the perception of similarity between the contact languages’ elements and structures, the frequency of linguistic units in language use and their recency in discourse. I demonstrate that the perception of similarity between the contact languages’ elements and structures opens up possibilities for code-mixing, whereas the frequency and recency of linguistic units influence the probability of their use in code-mixing.

This presentation contrasts two different members of the proposed Na-Dené-Yeniseian family (Navajo, Ket) and focuses on the similarities and differences that show up in the behavior of inflectional morphemes.  The continuum of inflection and derivation/grammar and lexicon is addressed by the property of "thematicity" that emerges when grammatical and lexical morphemes constructionalize. The genetical question is not answered here, but the conclusions that arise by comparing these two languages could also be discussed in historical linguistics, namely, why and how thematicity emerges.

It is the purpose of this paper to assess some of these external-based statements about Canadian English on the basis of real-time internal data. It will be shown, while in many cases the external statements fulfill their purpose and represent a convenient shortcut to verifiable results, in other cases they may be far off, leaving us with a somewhat distorted picture of language use in early Canada.

A Linguística Funcional (LF), a Linguística Cognitiva (LC) e a Gramática de Construções (GC) tendem a ser vistas como modelos teóricos mutuamente compatíveis, se não em grande medida coincidentes. Esse estado de coisas torna difícil identificar com precisão os limites e as áreas de intersecção entre as três teorias, o que pode levar, segundo argumentamos, a certas concepções equivocadas. Diante desse cenário, este artigo parte da seguinte questão: quais são os limites e as intersecções entre LF, LC e GC? Em um esforço para responder a essa pergunta, e com isso mapear o território das abordagens cognitivofuncionais, adotaremos aqui duas perspectivas. De um lado, assumimos um ponto de vista histórico, buscando reconstruir brevemente as origens de cada arcabouço. De outro, concentramo-nos no momento presente, procurando oferecer uma descrição sucinta do mercado teórico contemporâneo de cada um desses paradigmas. Resumidamente, sustentamos que (i) cada arcabouço teórico surgiu a partir de um questionamento distinto em relação à tradição da linguística gerativa e (ii) o desenvolvimento histórico de cada modelo resultou, nos dias de hoje, em uma situação de forte convergência, mas de modo algum sobreposição completa, entre os três quadros teóricos.

In radical embodied cognitive science, behaviour derives from a history of agent-environment interactions. Many eukaryotes possess a central nervous system whose powers evolved in the service of managing action and perception. In humans skilled modes of action are integrated with language as people gain from learning to talk, listen and use literacies. Below, I use this view to reconsider the logic of entrenching and, specifically, to ask what use should be made of measures of 'entrenchment'. I conclude that linguistic entrenchment describes, not inner mechanisms, but facts about social practices and linguistic routines. Historically and individually derived linguistic routines enable a central nervous system to shape the habits and skills needed in a human life world. Pursuing the view, I describe robots that use agent-environment interactions to simulate symbol grounding and how artificial agents mimic phonetic change. This sustains the view that brains use sensorimotor-based quasi-robotic functions – not stores of facts about language-types ('linguistic forms'). Next, I argue that, if entrenching is central to learning, its linguistic versions must build on pragmatics or concerted social action. They depend on human observers. Finally, I stress that an anti-representationalist view of language emphasizes how people use the world, listen and talk as a result of building verbal habits into a history of entrenching action and perception. Given social resources – languages, written digits, alphabetic or ideographic characters, and social practices – people are able to link history, action and pragmatics to become and live as linguistic actors.

The use of named languages is still prevalent in current contact linguistics research. In this paper, I argue that this cannot explain many contact situations and types of language knowledge. I propose a usage-based account of language instead which does not take linguistic systems for granted but construes them based on the single linguistic unit. A language is seen as a radially organized network of constructions, which are interlinked through co-use, which employ the same inventory of linguistic forms and which are appropriate in the same socio-pragmatic circumstances.