Frequency in schema formation
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C4P118
2025-12-11
37
Frequency in schema formation
As we have seen, the central claim of Cognitive Grammar, with respect to the usage-based thesis, is that usage affects grammatical representation in the mind. Furthermore, frequency of use correlates with entrenchment. Two main types of frequency effects have been described in the literature: token frequency and type frequency. Each of these gives rise to the entrenchment of different kinds of linguistic units. While token frequency gives rise to the entrenchment of instances, type frequency gives rise to the entrenchment of more abstract schemas.
Token frequency refers to the frequency with which specific instances are used in language. For instance, the semantically related nouns falsehood and lie are differentially frequent. While lie is much more commonly used, falsehood is much more restricted in use. This gives rise to differential entrenchment of the mental representations of these forms. This is illustrated in the diagrams in Figure 4.4. The degree of entrenchment of a linguistic unit, whether instance or more abstract schema, is indicated by the degree to which the square box is emboldened.
Now let’s consider type frequency. While token frequency gives rise to the entrenchment of instances, type frequency gives rise to the entrenchment of more abstract schemas. For instance, the words lapped, stored, wiped, signed, typed are all instances of the past tense schema [VERBed]. The past tense forms flew and blew are instances of the past tense schema [XXew]. As there are fewer usage events involving the distinct lexical items blew and flew (as there are fewer distinct lexical items of this type relative to past tense forms of the -ed type), then it is predicted that the [XXew] type schema will be less entrenched in the grammar than the [VERBed] type schema. This is diagrammed in Figure 4.5.
Recall that, due to the non-reductive nature of the model, the predictability of an instance from a schema does not entail that the instance is not also stored in the grammar. Indeed, a unit with higher token frequency is more likely to be stored. For instance, the form girls is predictable from the lexical item girl, plus the schema [NOUN-s]. However, due to the high token frequency of the form girls, this lexical item is likely to be highly entrenched, in addition to the form girl and the plural schema [NOUN-s]. This contrasts with a plural noun like portcullises which is unlikely to be entrenched because this expression has low token frequency. Instead, this form would be sanctioned by combination of the plural schema and the singular form portcullis.
Bybee and Slobin (1982) provide empirical evidence for the view that frequency correlates with degree of entrenchment. They found that highly frequent irregular forms resist regularisation, while infrequent irregular forms tend to become regularised over time. Bybee and Slobin compared irregular past tense forms of English verbs like build– built from Jesperson’s (1942) historical grammar of English with their modern forms in the (1982) American Heritage Dictionary. They found that more frequently used irregular verbs like lend had retained the irregular past tense form (lent). In contrast, less frequent forms like blend could alternate between the irregular form with -t (blent) and the regular past tense form with the suffix -ed (blended). However, highly infrequent forms like wend were by (1982) listed only with the regular past tense suffix (wended). Table 4.1 lists the past tense endings for these verbs as they appear in the 1982 dictionary.
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