Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure
( Typological Studies in Language )
Publication series ： Typological Studies in Language
Author： Joan L. Bybee Paul J. Hopper
Publisher： John Benjamins Publishing Company
Publication year： 2001
E-ISBN: 9789027298034
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9789027229472
Subject： H0 Linguistics
Language： ENG
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Description
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.