This volume collects three decades of articles by the distinguished linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles essentially argue for the importance off frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. Her work has been very influential for a broad range of researchers in linguistics, particularly in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics.
The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive, authoritative, and interdisciplinary view of usage-based theory in linguistics. Contributions by an international team of established and emerging scholars discuss the application of used-based approaches in phonology, morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, language variation and change, language development, cognitive linguistics, and other subfields of linguistics. Unprecedented in depth and scope, this groundbreaking work of scholarship addresses all major theoretical and methodological aspects of usage-based linguistics while offering diverse perspectives and key insights into theory, history, and methodology. Throughout the text, in-depth essays explore up-to-date methodologies, emerging approaches, new technologies, and cutting-edge research in usage-based linguistics in many languages and subdisciplines. Topics include used-based approaches to subfields such as anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, statistical analysis, and corpus linguistics. Covering the conceptual foundations, historical development, and future directions of usage-based theory, The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics is a must-have reference work for advanced students and scholars in anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpora analysis, and other subfields of linguistics.
Although usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary selection between Old and Early Modern Spanish that led to the gradual replacement of the auxiliary ser ‘be’ with the auxiliary haber ‘have’. It analyses this process in terms of the interaction between gradience, gradualness, and the conserving effects of frequency and persistence in language change. The study contributes to the theory and methodology of diachronic linguistics, additionally offering insights on how to explain synchronic grammatical variation both within a language and between languages. The book is of interest to the fields of Spanish and Romance linguistics, syntax, as well as historical and variationist linguistics.
Re-examines frequency, entrenchment and salience, three foundational concepts in usage-based linguistics, through the prism of learning, memory, and attention.
This is a collection of three decades of articles by the linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles argue for the importance of frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure.
Over the past three decades studies investigating heritage speaker (HS) linguistic competencies have shown, time and again that, despite being L1 or 2L1 native speakers of their home language(s), HS outcomes display variation across a wide spectrum of differences as compared to each other, other types of bilinguals as well as their monolingual peers. Studies have traditionally used—mostly behavioral—methodologies rooted in adjacent established fields (e.g., L1 acquisition, adult L2 acquisition) offering, in addition to documenting and describing HS performance, important insights for linguistic theory and challenges related to (home/minority) language maintenance, contact, policy and more. A birds-eye view makes it clear that the methodologies one uses to tap into HSs’ linguistic knowledge areas, if not more, are important than the phenomena under investigation, especially in light of how their unique experiences with their heritage and other languages are present across a continuum.
Traditional semantic description of Ancient Greek prepositions has struggled to synthesize the varied and seemingly arbitrary uses into something other than a disparate, sometimes overlapping list of senses. The Cognitive Linguistic approach of prototype theory holds that the meanings of a preposition are better explained as a semantic network of related senses that radially extend from a primary, spatial sense. These radial extensions arise from contextual factors that affect the metaphorical representation of the spatial scene that is profiled. Building upon the Cognitive Linguistic descriptions of Bortone (2009) and Luraghi (2009), linguists, biblical scholars, and Greek lexicographers apply these developments to offer more in-depth descriptions of select postclassical Greek prepositions and consider the exegetical and lexicographical implications of these findings. This volume will be of interest to those studying or researching the Greek of the New Testament seeking more linguistically-informed description of prepositional semantics, particularly with a focus on the exegetical implications of choice among seemingly similar prepositions in Greek and the challenges of potentially mismatched translation into English.
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.
