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Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure Typological Studies in Language (Tsl) FREQUENCY AND THE EMERGENCE OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL) A companion series to the journal “STUDIES IN LANGUAGE” Honorary Editor: Joseph H. Greenberg General Editor: Michael Noonan Assistant Editors: Spike Gildea, Suzanne Kemmer Editorial Board: Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Ronald Langacker (San Diego) Bernard Comrie (Leipzig) Charles Li (Santa Barbara) R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra) Andrew Pawley (Canberra) Matthew Dryer (Buffalo) Doris Payne (Oregon) John Haiman (St Paul) Frans Plank (Konstanz) Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago) Bernd Heine (Köln) Dan Slobin (Berkeley) Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara) Andrej Kibrik (Moscow) Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies. The orientation of the volumes will be substantive rather than formal, with the aim of investigating universals of human language via as broadly defined a data base as possible, leaning toward cross- linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data. Volume 45 Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure FREQUENCY AND THE EMERGENCE OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE Edited by JOAN BYBEE University of New Mexico PAUL HOPPER Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure / edited by Joan Bybee, Paul Hopper. p. cm. -- (Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Frequency (Linguistics). 2. Grammar, Comparative and general. I. Bybee, Joan. II. Hopper, Paul. III. Series. P128.F73F74 2001 415--dc21 00-051912 ISBN 90 272 2947 3 (Eur.) / 1 58811 027 3 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) ISBN 90 272 2948 1 (Eur.) / 1 58811 028 1 (US) (Pb; alk. paper) CIP © 2001 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA Contents Introduction to frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure 1 Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper Part I: Patterns of Use Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation 27 Sandra A. Thompson and Paul J. Hopper Local patterns of subjectivity in person and verb type in American English conversation 61 Joanne Scheibman Paths to prepositions? Acorpus-based study of the acquisition of a lexico-grammatical category 91 Naomi Hallan Part II: Word-level frequency effects Lexical diffusion, lexical frequency, and lexical analysis 123 Betty S. Phillips Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast 137 Janet B. Pierrehumbert Emergent phonotactic generalizations in English and Arabic 159 Stefan A. Frisch, Nathan R. Large, Bushra Zawaydeh, and David B. Pisoni Ambiguity and frequency effects in regular verb inflection 181 Mary L. Hare, Michael Ford and William D. Marslen-Wilson Frequency, regularity and the paradigm: Aperspective from Russian on a complex relation 201 Greville Corbett, Andrew Hippisley, Dunstan Brown, and Paul Marriott vi contents Part III: Phrases and constructions Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production 229 Daniel Jurafsky, Alan Bell, Michelle Gregory, and William D. Raymond Frequency effects and word-boundary palatalization in English 255 Nathan Bush The role of frequency in the realization of English that 281 Catie Berkenfield Frequency, iconicity, categorization: Evidence from emerging modals 309 Manfred G. Krug Frequency effects on French liaison 337 Joan Bybee The role of frequency in the specialization of the English anterior 361 K. Aaron Smith Hypercorrect pronoun case in English? Cognitive processes that account for pronoun usage 383 Joyce TangBoyland Variability, frequency, and productivity in the irrealis domain of French 405 Shana Poplack Part IV: General Familiarity, information flow, and linguistic form 431 Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon Emergentist approaches to language 449 Brian Macwhinney Inflationary effects in language and elsewhere 471 Östen Dahl Subject index 481 Name index 487 Acknowledgements The articles in this volume are revised versions of papers given to an invitational symposium held at Carnegie Mellon University in May 1999. Our thanks are due to David Kaufer, Chair of the English Department, and Peter Stearns, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, at CMU for their generosity in providing funding and in placing department and college facilities at our disposal during the confer- ence. We also wish to thank Chris Werry, then a graduate student in rhetoric at CMU, for his efficiency and hard work in coordinating the local arrangements. We would also like to thank the participants, most of whom traveled from far and wide to attend and share their ideas. Asubstantial portion of the task of copy-editing and editorial assistance was undertaken by Catie Berkenfield, of the University of New Mexico, whose thor- oughness and patience carried the project through in good form. The editors and contributors alike owe Catie a special note of thanks. Funding from Robert and Elizabeth Bybee with matching funds from the Exxon Foundation covered the costs of editorial assistance. Finally, the editors are grateful to the contributors for produc- ing excellent papers for the symposium and for allowing them to be published here. Introduction to frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure JOAN BYBEE and PAUL HOPPER 1. Introduction Alegacy of the structural tradition in linguistics is the widespread acceptance of the premise that language structure is independent of language use. This premise is codified in a variety of theoretical distinctions, such as langue and parole (Saussure 1916) and competence and performance (Chomsky 1965). Afurther premise of this legacy is that the study of structure is a higher calling than the study of usage and is a potentially more promising avenue for uncovering the basic cognitive mecha- nisms that make human language possible. In contrast, outside linguistics it is widely held that cognitive representations are highly affected by experience. In humans and non-humans detailed tracking of prob- abilities leads to behavior that promotes survival (Kelly and Martin 1994). Even within linguistics, certain usage-based effects permeate the general lore that practi- tioners and theoreticians accept: unmarked members of categories are more frequent than marked members (Greenberg 1966); irregular morphological formations with high frequency are less likely to regularize; regular patterns have a wider range of applicability; and high frequency phrases undergo special reduction. Many of these effects had been catalogued and described by George K. Zipf in a pioneering work from the 1930s, The Psycho-Biology of Language (Zipf 1965 [1935]). Zipf is known these days chiefly for his “law’’ that the length of a word is inversely proportional to its frequency and his explanation through the “principle of least effort.’’ While this aspect of Zipf’s work is often criticized (see, for example, Miller 1965), he anticipated many of the themes of more recent investigations of the relationship between frequency and structure, such as the fusion of pronouns with auxiliaries in forms like we’re, you’ll, etc. and their significance for the genesis of inflection (Zipf 1965 [1935], 247–51). Zipf coined the term “dynamic philology’’ for the quantita- tive study of language change and its relevance for linguistic structure. Zipf’s work in linguistics was taken up only sporadically in the discipline as 2 introduction linguists focused their attention on the theoretical questions of how to define the structural units of language exclusively through local combinatorial possibilities. However, by the 1980s, a number of linguists had begun to think of linguistic struc- ture (grammar) as a response to discourse needs, and to consider seriously the hy- pothesis that grammar comes about through the repeated adaptation of forms to live discourse (Hopper 1979; Givón 1979; Givón (ed.) 1983; Hopper and Thompson 1980, 1984; Du Bois 1985). The parallel question of how experience with language as reflected in frequency could affect cognitive representations and categorization and thus the internalized grammar of language users also began to occupy research- ers at this time in both linguistics (Bybee 1985) and psychology (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). Arelated development, symptomatic of the increasing impa- tience with studies of individual “competence’’and growing suspicion regarding the reliability of intuitions as a source of data, was the rise in the 1990s of the new field of corpus linguistics. Starting from trends that had begun with “computational lin- guistics’’ going back as far as the 1950s, corpus linguistics has been made possible by the exponential increase in data storage and high-speed processing. While the corpus is the prime tool for frequency studies in general, with many linguists it also serves as a heuristic for new facts about linguistic
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